Maria Moreno - 3D character artist

Maria Moreno - 3D character artist

This post is a collection of my most outstanding work from the past year, in which I have been completing my studies as a 3D character artist for games in Think Tank Training Centre. I am currently still working on my mentorship project, which will be the highlight of my demo reel, but here I will focus on the projects I have completed, starting with the most recent one.

Community fanart - Abed Nadir

This project started as a way to decompress and relax while working on my demo reel, but I very quickly became invested in it. It's a rendition of the TV show community, particularly an episode in which the characters play a paintball tournament. This character is played by the actor Danny Pudi, and is definitely my favourite in the show, which made the whole process really fun and enjoyable. I didn't use any concept art as a reference, only screenshots from the show and a lot of pictures of Pudi's face. The project was completed in about 4 weeks.

Here are some of the main references for the likeness, jacket and gun from my pureRef file. Fortunately there are a lot of good pictures of Pudi, and his face has very defined shapes which really helped me achieve it.

For the gun, I researched the model that was actually used in the episode, which is a Tippmann TPX cal 68., but I changed the brand for my own nickname signature, to make it a little bit more personal and fun. I started the blockout in maya, and modelled most of it there, to then take it to zbrush and use mainly booleans and dynamesh utility to get soft bevels and transitions. Here are a couple zbrush renders of the highpoly

For the jacket, I wanted to get accurate folds, but still keep a strongly stylized look, so I decided to use a combined approach. First, I created the shirt inside marvelous using the T pose avatar. Then, after posing in zbrush with Transpose master, I used the morph target feature in marvelous to get good folds in the bending points. 

Once I was satisfied, I exported it and sculpted over it in zbrush to get a blocky and stylized look in the folds. I mainly used Hpolish, TrimDynamic and pinch brushes to achieve this look. The seams were created as separate subtools, and I sculpted on them basically using Standard and DamStandard, and then baked them onto the low poly. I also modeled some stylized buttons to complete the outfit. The model is meant to be of game resolution, but the jacket is made just for show purposes in terms of topology, since I wanted the folds to pop and be a big part of the final look.

For the hair, I used blender curves with a custom bevel. This is my usual approach to stylized hair, since its non-destructive and it offers you a lot of control over the tilt, size and profile of the geometry. I tried both with small strands and bigger ones, and ended up going for the latter, because they looked more stylized and would be easier to retopologize and texture. I then converted the curves to geo and brought them to zbrush, and sculpted on them using damStandard and Hpolish mainly, giving them sharp edges to break up the shapes. I used this sculpt to retopologize it, breaking it into three chunks to make it better for baking.

The hair shader creation inside marmoset was also very interesting. I had already done a similar process before, but I made some tweaks to make it look even more stylized. I basically used anisotropic reflections, and a slightly higher specular reflectivity, to give it a shiny look with localized directional highlights. I was thinking of using roughness maps to break down the highlights even more, but I ended up liking the plain version better. 

The transmission is set to subsurface scattering, but the subsurface itself is off, and just the fuzz is turned all the way up to give the impression of light scatter. Eyebrows and lashes are in the same texture set, but they are slightly masked out of the specular so that they don't appear so shiny. Here you can see a close up where the shader pops up more.

As for the rest of the elements, I sculpted the face from scratch, without a base mesh, as an anatomy practice. His very boney facial structure made for an interesting and fun likeness exercise. I then retopologized it manually, to make sure that the edge flow was following the shapes of this face. For the body, I used the same base mesh that I sculpted for my previous project, except for the hands, which I wanted to look rowdier than the ones I had. I actually poly modeled the hands for a blocky look, and then sculpted over them.

In this process view and marmoset viewer you can see more in depth all the passes and topology. Textures were done entirely inside Substance Painter. I was torn between a totally stylized approach, with baked lighting and shadows, or a more PBR approach. In the end I went for a mixed solution, where you can see some of the light and shadow baked onto the diffuse, and a heavy use of curvature and ambient occlusion maps and hand painting, but the rendering is raytraced in Marmoset 4 using PBR material shaders. There is no subsurface scatter in the skin, but I tried to use color and lighting to give the impression of it.

Post-apocalyptic Naruto

This piece was my submission for the Advanced term final project in Think Tank. It's based on the beautiful concept art by Sergi Brosa (see here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3qm8rD), although I did put a little bit of my style into it, since the concept was extremely stylized and I wanted to do something more in between. It took me 8 weeks from start to finish, and I learnt so much about the game pipeline during the process. Unfortunately, most of the work in progress files are in my old computer, so I couldn't retrieve them for this post, but I'll try to break it down as best as I can using what I have.

One of the most challenging parts of the project was concepting the weapons. Since they are mostly hidden in the concept, I had to take references of other artworks by Brosa and create my own version for them. Also, the character has a lot of little elements that took a long time to model and retopologize, which took most of the time I had for it. These are the sketches I made for the weapons, which I then followed loosely, filling in with the parts that I could actually see in the concept. The next picture shows a close up of the final result.

In this closer shots you can better appreciate the textures and shapes. I put a lot of emphasis on the hard surface elements, especially the bevels, which I wanted to be really thick and apparent. This made the retopology process pretty challenging and made the polycount go up a little, but I still managed to keep it inside a reasonable amount, despite all the tiny objects. I saved some texture space by duplicating some of those and keeping them with the same UVs, such as the chains and little metallic bits. 

The texturing of the grenades was one of my favorite parts of the whole piece. I think they turned out pretty good, so I decided to include this close up to showcase them. I went pretty close to the concept, but also experimented a bit with the breakup of the paint, showing the metal underneath. I also really enjoyed the cloth texturing, especially in the belts. I used a lot of military gear references to give it more believability.

The cloth was also very interesting to model. For the shirt and undershirt, I used the same mixed approach that I used for Abed's jacket, but the pants were sculpted from scratch. The pants were especially challenging, since they were very baggy and had a lot of compression folds. Looking back, I think I could definitely improve it, but for the timeline I had, I was pretty happy with the result.

For the hair I used basically the same approach explained before, except the texturing was a bit more complex, and highlights are more broken down using roughness maps. I also gave it a little bit of subsurface scatter. Since the overall look is a little bit more realistic in terms of textures than the Abed project, I thought it would look more cohesive and less plasticky. The skin does actually have subsurface and cavity maps, so it's definitely more towards the PBR realistic approach, but with an anime look. In this process view you can see a breakdown of the different channels. 

In this process view and marmoset viewer you can take a more in-depth look. The texturing approach, despite being more realistic than the previous project I showed, still makes a heavy use of ambient occlusion and curvature maps to keep a stylized anime-like look. Overall, I think this project was a very interesting exercise for me in terms of learning how to stylize, conceptualize, and follow the game workflow within a deadline.

Finally, I wanted to include this little stylized tileable texture that I created and used for the presentation of the project. It was part of an exercise in the Substance Designer course of Think Tank Online. I basically modelled a few bricks on zbrush, arranged them in a tileable pattern, and then used that to generate the rest of the maps purely in Designer. I really enjoyed it, since texturing is one of my favorite parts of the pipeline, and Designer gives so much flexibility to create really interesting resources from basic inputs. In this process view you can see the albedo, height, normal, roughness and AO.

Work in progress - Red Menace

To wrap up this post, I also want to share the current state of my mentorship project. It's based on an awesome concept by Jin Kwang Park (see here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z5LVJx). I was really amazed by it, and I think the mix of military and hard surface elements with the fantasy and creature look is really stunning. Im rendering it in Unreal 5. If you flip this process view really fast, you can see a close up of her head turning around.

Here you can take a look at the different channels. The texturing is almost done, I basically just need to do the hair cards and pose it, then I'll be ready for lighting and rendering it. 

A wide shot to showcase the whole model

A close up on the ammo backpack

I am particularly happy with the weapons, which I really enjoyed modelling. I used the same process than with the paintball gun, but it was obviously way more complex. I think the high poly and bakes turned out really well, so I wanted to share some quick zbrush renders

That's the end of it!  I hope you enjoyed my work. I look forward to keep working on my mentorship project and completing it pretty soon. I have to also thank all the Think Tank staff and my classmates, that helped me and supported me during the creation of all these projects. 

You can see my previous work in my artstation:

https://www.artstation.com/mariamoreno95

Thanks for watching!