Orc Warlord

Orc Warlord

As a part of my coursus at SAE Institute of Geneva, I was assigned by my teacher, to create a 3D model of an orc, including texturing and rendering. This exercise allowed me to understand the VFX industry workflow to create a character wich would be animated ready. 

This work is based off the concept of Kristina Katunina. 

Zbrush clay

After gathering all my references for anatomy and humanoid creatures, I started the sculpt of the body in Zbrush. For this part I mostly worked with dynamesh so I could make as much of modifications I wanted in the model, It also allowed me to explore the shapes and details.

Most part of the props were modelled in Maya. I was able to model more than 80 individual mesh, and had to put together a bit more than 200 mesh around the character. As a beginner this was my biggest challenge, because I had to finish the modeling part in less than 3 weeks and I had a lot of tiny mesh to arrange. I was able to do this thanks to the intese month of zbrush lessons I had right before I start this project.

In order to optimize my speed I made IMM Brushes out of some of those props.

The fur was all done as much as realistic possible, by this I meant hat it had to be strands of fur and animation ready. I sculpted 7 to 10 different types of strands . For it to be an accurate mesh I retopo each strand in Maya with the Quaddraw tool. And I unfolded their UV's so it would be optimized for the layout later. 

Finally I created an Imm brush in Zbrush and put together different type of tufts of those strands in order to create variety.

Uvs and Wireframe

Once I was done with the body sculpt, I had to retopo the mesh for it to have a more accurate mesh with good distribution of polygons and be animation ready.

In Maya and I used the Quaddraw tool again to retopology. Finaly, I unfolded the UV's according to each type of the character. The fur was the most intense and had to take 3 udims in ordres to have a proprer texture density.

The eyes took one udim so I could work wiht the displace and the opacity texture feature in Maya. The body took 2 udims. I tried to put the weapons together, and the rest of the clothes too.

Texturing and Compositing

Once the Uv's were unfolded and layout, I baked the model in Substance and put together 3 diferents types of texturing folders. One for the armor, weapons, fur and leather. The second for the skin, nails and the last one for dirt, dust and deformations.

The eye and skin albedos were done in Zbrush with polypaint and worked further on them in Maya.

After that, I put together a Maya scene where I connected the texture and displacement maps to the character mesh. 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 2 different mesh, the cornea and the iris, I had to work on them differently, adding Subsurface on the iris and opacity on the cornea. Finally, the interior of mouth had to have more like a wet kind of texture.

Then I arranged a few lights in the scene, using the 3 light setting, an HDRI of desert landscape and a camera with 50mm focal length.

I rendered the turntable and imported it in Nuke to work through the composition of the light and some grades. I made the light stronger so the shadows would pop up more and make it look menacing.

 I finally did the color grading of the overall in Davinci Resolve. 

Turntable