Grosfusil

Project Grosfusil 

Hi, my name is Nicoly Santos and I'll walk you through the production of a stylized character. This is a 3D animation ready character based on a concept by Mehdy Alibeygi.

As my first try on grooming I wanted to choose a simple haired character, and I simply fell in love with this concept. I worked throughout the whole asset production workflow adapted for the animation industry. The character was sculpted in Zbrush and the prop modelled in Maya. I also did the groom in Maya with Xgen, and the texturing in Substance Painter. I rendered in Maya using Arnold features. Furthermore I also worked in it's topology, Uv's mapping and Look Development. Finally, I did some compositing in Nuke and Davinci Resolve.

Progress

Concept by Mehdi Alibeygi

Modeling in Zbrush

The full modeling of the character was done in Zbrush. I started off with a blocking base of the overall form in order to have better accuracy of the concept. For it to be visually apealling in 3D, some visual modification choices were made along the way, like the head and arms position.

Uvs Mapping and Wireframe

Once I was done with the sculpt, I had to retopo the mesh to have a more accurate mesh with good distribution of polygons.

The retopology would allow me to level up the details and also serve me for a future rig so it could be animated. In order to procede I decimated my model for less than 1million polygons to be able to import it into Maya

In Maya and I used the quad draw to retopology.

Finaly, I unfolded the UV's and projected the details on it in Zbrush.

Texturing

I based my texturing off Pixar/ Dreamworks works. I really love their rendering style and therefore I wanted to emulate it. For the model to have a more alive and Pixar 3D realistic feel, I opted for a more photorealistic texturing.

The eye and skin albedos were done in Zbrush with polypaint and imported in Substance Painter for further details, and to place the tattoo on his arm. To validate the lookdev, I put together a Maya scene where I connected the texture and displacement maps to the character mesh.

Then I worked further on the skin, adding a crocodile type of skin to show depth of pores and skin imperfections, and finally Subsurface Scattering. The eyes were two different mesh, the cornea and the iris, I added Subsurface on the iris and opacity on the cornea. Finally, the interior of mouth also were more detailed, as it had to have more like a wet kind of texture.

The grooming was the real challenge, as it was my first time trying it. I used Xgen features in Maya.

Putting together the guides and brushing the hair with clumps, noise and curl variation wasn't the most complicated part. Xgen is very demanding towards the workflow behind the scenes: the folders needs good names so xgen features can work their way through the folder's tree. Each type of hair needs a different scalp, therefore a different description.

At last I ended up with thirteen types of hair descriptions for each type of hair: the head, the moustache, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the dusty type of hair on the clothes, the fluffy shirt, the arms, the torso, the beard and finally the overal skin.

Posing

The posing was done using Zbrush transpose master. I also made layers out of the posing so I could make blendshapes and manage to wrap the groom onto the scalp and make it all move, forming the pose.

Turntable

For the turntable I made a Maya scene with 4 different lights and an HDRI of a night sky. The camera used had a 50mm focal length. I added a simple moving rig so the character would turn around, then I animated the turn. 

The compositing of the final render was done in Nuke with the help of various AOV's that a got from the maya render images. I made the light stronger and softer and some color changes. Then I put a vignetting, blooming and some blur around the edges. The final colorgrading was done in Davinci Resolve, I made the final render more blue.