Demo Reel Denny Diel 2023

             Demo Reel Denny Diel

Minotaur

For my first demo project I decided to model a Minotaur. He gives me the opportunity to show understanding of human and animal anatomy.

Usually Minotaurs get depicted as strong monsters or warriors, so I took a different approach and pushed the idea of the concept and tried to create a friendly and noble character. I also took inspiration from greek mythology, but instead of exiling him into a labyrinth, I made him wealthy and stylish.

Huge thanks to Julian Büttner for lighting and building the scene. He also did the compositing for this project. Check out his profile!

References

Using the right reference was cruical for this project, because there are no set rules for the anatomy of a Minotaur. I had to figure out how to make the transitions between human and animal anatomy work. An example for this issue is the transition between head and torso. Since cows have much heavier heads than humans, the supporting muscles have to be much bigger. The character has to have a big neck, which led to the problem that a standard human torso would be out of proportions.

So I took a look at other peoples work to understand which problems I would be facing with this project and how they tried to solve them. Most artists like to design Minotaurs very muscular which I wanted to avoid. So I had to figure out how to make the anatomy believable.

Modeling

The most difficult task was to create the legs. Since cows walk on the tip of their toes, proportions and anatomy change compared to humans. I was constantly balancing proportions through feedback iterations and own interpretation.

I quickly created different rough body types for the character to visualize what could work proportion and design-wise.

I went for the chubby/musclular body type, because there was no way to make and athletic or skinny body work. The extra weight coming from longer limbs and the head did not allow me to have a weak body. So I decided to make him chubby and counter the "warrior/monster" idea of a Minotaur.

From there on I refined shapes and started to introduce secondary shapes to the model.

A quickly blocked pose helped me to understand how the main selling shot could look like.

I used Marvelous Desinger for a quick cloth mesh and tried to save time by not detailing the body parts which were covered by the clothing. This was important, because the designing process took quite a while.

The main sculpting part was done and I moved on to retopologize, uv unwrap and texture.

Texturing

Creating the base color for the character was very difficult. Since my character had no hair, I looked at hairless animals. There are some dogs, chimps and also cows which have close to no hair. This allowed me to analyse the color information beneath the fur.

At first I tried to stick with the concept color wise, but it turned out boring and I wanted to introduce some variety. I decided to use the color scheme of a hairless chimp.

I mainly used Mari for the texturing process. Befor creating the Mari setup, I imported the model into Substance Painter to create some general breakup, Ambient Occlusion, Thickness and Curvature maps that I could use in Mari. The breakup maps are a combination of inverted or regular curvature information and grunges. I exported three maps into one file by giving the layers only red, green or blue values. In Mari I can use a "SplitRGBA" node to separate the color information into three unique masks. With the help of Radio Transmitter nodes I can access them anywhere in the node tree.

I imported all meshes as one object into Mari and painted primary isolation masks to separate the skin from the mouthbag and other parts of the body. That way I can work on all meshes in one node tree and isolate them through masks at any time by using radio nodes. Throughout the project I painted secondary isolation masks to differentiate between soft and hard areas on the skin or any detail that I projected or painted.

I used some marble, leather and concrete tileables to generate overall breakup as a basis before starting to project images and paint.

To generate a roughness map I used the painted color information and converted it to linear information, desaturated and adjusted it with a levels, contrast and clamp node.

With this workflow I can save a lot of time. Dark colors translate into low roughness and bright colors into high roughness values. I painted the inner area of the ear in a bright color which means that the roughness would be high. If I want that area to be more specular I can use the secondary iso mask through a radio node for this area to level the information to darker values.

Assets

The clothing was created in Marvelous Designer. The patterns are just big rectangles which are wrapped around the character. To wrap the cloth I stopped the simulation very often to pin the vertices to the right place on the character. The chiton (greek garment) is held together with a brooch at the shoulder and a rope around the waist. I layed out a small belt with elasticity to simulate the effect of the rope. I pinned the belt when it was at the right position and used the sculpting tool in Marvelous to tuck the chiton beneath it, because the simulation would push the mesh outward. Afterwards, I froze the geometry and wrapped the scarf around my character. To make them interact, I unfroze the chiton and simulated them together.

The jewelry on Minotaurs head was modeled in Maya. I created one chain link and blocked out the length of the individual chain parts with curves.

Then I distributed the chain links with MASH along the curves. Saad Hassan, a friend of mine created a small Houdini tool which I could use to simulate the chain falling on the characters head.

Conclusion

I learned a lot about texturing, shading and sculpting during this project, but there are a few things I would do different today. The base color needs more imperfections and the overall roughness is too high and needs more breakup.

In hindsight I probably should have copied a full body concept, but along this process I learned a lot about proportions, the process of creating a character and concepting.

The sculpt is imbalanced. I focused on the head and left some areas behind. The body needs more secondary shapes, such as muscle definition and irregularities on the skin. The pose works in the main shot, but the silhouette is lacking in other camera angles. It would have been better not to seperate the nails, horns and hoofs from the main geo for the texturing process. Surface transitions would have been more natural in the texture and the geo.

A groom would have been nice, because the tail looks weird without hair. I want to improve my grooming skills in the near future and this project will be revisited for that.

Goblin

This project started while I was doing my daily ZBrush excercises. I thought it would be good opportunity to practice skin surfacing, because the creature has chubby, muscular and skinny areas which result in the skin being either flexible, loose or stretched.

References

I looked for muscular and skinny people and found monks to be most fitting . However I did not want to have loose and thin skin for my creature, because it would not fit the environment I intended it to live in.

The Goblin lives in wet caves and when skin has contact with wetness over a long period of time it gets bloated and pruny. There are not many animals that live in caves beside some newts and bats, so I took inspiration from eels, frogs and some deep sea sharks for the skin quality.

Modeling

The challenging part while sculpting was to understand when to look at the concept drawing and when to look at real anatomy/people. In hindsight I should have leaned more to the realistic site, because areas like the belly or the mouth did not really turn out that well. 

Here are some work in progress screenshots from start to finish.

You can notice that I rotated the eyes so that they would be more forward looking.  He is a predator and in the animal kingdom predators evolved to have forward vision for better hunting capability.

This creature should have a painful existance, due to a malformed body with weird proportions. I also made the bones sharp and let them stick out of the body to push this idea. The emphasis on the shape of the skull gave him a scary and ghostly look.

As a sanity check I also like to change light direction every now and then to get an idea of how the model will look under certain light conditions. Highlights and shadows tell me if my volumes are off or correct.

While posing I focused on the silhouette,  to have interesting shapes in many camera angles in contrast to the Minotaur.

Talking to animators for feedback was very helpful, since they have to deal with gesture, flow and silhouette every day.

Texturing

I set up Mari and started to paint rough masks, then tried many different color pallets I generated using coolors.co

At first I liked the original pallet from the concept, but I wanted to make it more interesting by combining the color gradient of cave frogs, the vivid and toxic colors of poison dart frogs and mixed it with patterns of eels and newts.

This time I took a different approach to texturing skin. Human skin is very spotted, so I created myself a brush that randomly sprays dots and repainted the color masks for an organic feel. This technique gave me natural results for the color transitions. 

I used lightining alphas and marble veins to paint small capillaries on the pale skin. 

The roughness map was created with the same workflow I used for the Minotaur, but the overall values were lower and I tried to break up the specular information with micro displacement. This way the model could catch more specular highlights.

For the sss scale I decided to overdrive the values a little bit, because the Goblin is overall smaller than a human. I think it works quiet well on the pale areas of the skin, since they absorb less light than skin with high melanin. 

Oversculpt

Lastly I imported the Mari displacement into ZBrush and put it on a layer. Then I created new layers to enhance the displacement and also made some adjustments to the base sculpt.

Presentation

Lighting and Compositing are not my greatest strenghts, but I gave it a shot. Since I spent a good amount of time on the pose, I could already imagine some cameras before animating. While posing I also tested some lighting scenarios in ZBrush.

I did not want to place the Goblin in a black void, so I bought some rocks on CGTrader to fill the background. However the rock the Goblin was standing on needed to be sculpted, to be able to conform to my needs. I could have used an existing rock, but the pose would have been different. I gave it a Megascans texture which look similar to the rocks in the background and called it a day. The rocks are not the focus of this project and I wanted to wrap it up to be able to focus on the next project. 

In Nuke I threw on some chromatic aberration, lens distortion, exponential glow and color corrected the image a little bit. 

Conclusion

This project helped me to get a better understanding of sculpting different skin qualities. I could also improve on my posing skills. Marco Menco gave me awesome feedback on the sculpt during our last Workshop lesson. The face has some areas where the skin should not have folds or wrinkles. Especially the skin on the cheek should wrap tightly to the bone instead of creating folds. I would replace the wrinkles with skin cracks to keep the idea. The areas I'm most unhappy with are the belly and the mouth, which are areas where I stuck to the concept. The highlights on the belly look like the abdominal muscles are peaking through and the amount and alignment of the teeth dont fit the way the creature would consume food.

In comparison to the Minotaur I think that the skin texturing and shading works better. I got a better feeling on what I should focus while texturing and what values and hues I need in my maps. 

What comes next?

First of all thank you for reading through my breakdown! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me :) 

Artstation

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I currently participate in the Fantasy Creature Design Workshop by Marco Menco. I chose to sculpt a giant and will continue working on it after a small break.

The other project I'm working on is a bear ecorché. With this project I want to deepen my knowledge of quadruped anatomy. It also gives me an opportunity to get into CFX, with Houdini muscle simulation and grooming. 

Special thanks to Tom Herzig and Giorgio Lorenzetti for mentoring me during these projects!

Shoutout to the boys: Andreas Niederhofer, Julian Büttner and Lyon Rosenblatt!