Giovanni Savastano's characters

by GiovanniSavastano on 27 May 2023 for Rookie Awards 2023

Hey! I am Giovanni, a 25 year old guy with the goal to join the game industry as character artist (you know, we live only once, so why not doing what you love). I am a selft taught artist trying to push his art to the professional level. I like to create realistic characters with both hardsurface and organic sculpt.

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Giovanni Savastano's characters

by GiovanniSavastano

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"Elizabeth IV" is an original character I designed, the intent was to create a princess knight to work on hard surface mixed with organic sculpt. I designed this character by feeling inspired from random pictures.

The character is been sculpted in Zbrush starting from a sphere, I created the base body and on top I created the base mesh of the clothes and then added the folds; for the hardsurface parts I sculpted the volume in Zbrush and with the manual retopology in Maya I got a cleaner mesh; for the scabbard I used a mix of alpha I made in Photoshop, some pictures turned in alpha and manual masking; for the surface details I used both alphas and sculpt in Zbrush; for the skin pores I made a single pore alpha and then turned in a group of pores and applied through the HD geometry tool in Zbrush.

The retopology is made by hand in Maya following the animation edgeflow, after I UV mapped the character in: 1 set for the head, 1 for the eyes, 1 for the clothes, 1 for the sword and the scabbard, 1 for the armor and the chainmail, 1 for the leather parts and 1 for the hair textures.

The texturing is made by hand in Substance Painter following the PBR workflow. I made a base color with roughness and on top of that I created variety with generators and hand painting; for the skin I made a simple texture following the skin color variation and painting some details later, I also created a roughness map based on curvature map I got from the normal map exported from Zbrush; for the leather, the fabric details and metal I used generators and alphas on the brush.

After I created the hair in xgen, turned into geometry and baked onto a plane to get the cards and I manually placed it in Maya.

I went through the rigging process, creating a simple rig joint by joint, to easily pose the character.

The render is made in Marmoset Toolbag.

"Black Freeza" I got inspired with this character and I decided to make it with my art style. I used this project as an experiment to test my progress in the character modeling workflow, this is the very first character I've made after a focused study of the anatomy started a month ago. With this project I also wanted to play with the retopology creating one single mesh with different polygon density and keeping the main edgeloops based on the anatomy. In this workflow I used Zbrush to sculpt the character starting from a sphere and after the retopology I sculpted the wrinkles with the HD geometry and exported the normal map for baking the curvature, the AO and the thickness in Substance Painter.

I retopologized the character manually in Maya merging all together exept for the eyes and the feet, and then I UV mapped it, I used 6 UDIMs for the body and a single set for the eyes.

In Substance Painter I baked the maps from the normal map and I used the high poly to bake the ID map to easily texture the merged parts. To texture this character I used what I call a "three color system" which is assigning the main color and add variation with a lighter and a darker color, after this I added other details like a bit of dirt, and in the face I added a bit of skin variation using some purple variations; for the roughness I added a main layer defining the difference between metal parts, spheres and skin, and I added variation in the pores and wrinkles with the curvature map.

For the eyes I used a simple mesh for the cornea cutting out with an alpha map the part where we have the pupil, which is another mesh sculpted in Zbrush to get all the details of the eye.

Before rendering this character I went through the rigging process, creating a simple rig joint by joint and adding more joints for the tail.

The render is made in Marmoset Toolbag.

"King Eustace" this is a character I designed inspired on the design of Horizon Forbidden West because, since the artists that worked on it started to publish the characters they have worked on, I fell in love with that style and I let it inspire me to create something placed in that universe.

The character is been sculpted in Zbrush starting from a sphere, creating the base body to use in Marvelous Designer to simulate the main folds of the tunic, the pants and the shoes and adding some specific ones later in Zbrush. For the hard surface parts I sculpted the volume with the bigger plane changes in Zbrush and used the manual retopology in Maya to get a clean result. The belts, the ropes and the knots are made in Maya using the sweep mesh tool and then I added more details in Zbrush.

The render is made in Marmoset Toolbag.

Note: the character is still a WIP, this high poly version is missing of all the surface details, some props, the weapon and the feather/fur collar. The character will be retopologized, textured, rigged and posed for the final product.

Story:

"He is the king of his people, a king different from the others, everyone treats him as a father and more than a village they are a family.

He was born in a nomad clan, he learned how to survive in nature since his childhood. The nomad life was composed of a strict routine: estabilish a camp, gather the food and everything the nature had to offer and leave when the machines starts to notice you. Living this way for years, he found his happiness only with his wife first and his daughter then, until that day.

One night the clan woke up with screams of fear because another clan was attacking them and burning out everything they could. Everyone in the camp was ready to fight to protect their families, his daughter was on the battlefield too. In the beginning the fight seemed fair but they suddenly started to lose allies, the enemies were too many and it was only a matters of time, he tried to protect his daughter and he got hit on the arm and someone barely saved him, in one night almost all of them were wiped out.

The morning after the only things left about his family were his daughter's earring with a feather and his wife's necklace.

After they figured out who planned the attack, the few members remaining started a journey for avenge their clan. In the two years later they trained for the upcoming fight and during this journey they gathered new members of the clan.

The day of the battle they arrived at the enemy's camp, before the battle started he wore his wife's necklace and tied up the feather to his halberd and gave the signal to start the attack. That night there was a war even worse than what they experienced years before, this time they were prepared to fight and surprising the enemies they easily got in the chief's tent, but they didn't find a man ready to fight, they found a dying chief holding tight his wife and his children, so they decided for having mercy of that people.

After that night they decided to abandon the nomad life to found a village, and they decided that he has to become the king of this new beginning."