Pokémon Zangoose VFX

The final beauty render of a Pokémon character in accordance to a brief.

This project was created in order to meet a brief from college. The requirements specified that it must be created using a PBR-Workflow, and which must be composited onto an action plate.

The tools utilised for this project was Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop and Nuke.

Within Maya, a blockout of the characters' correct height according to information found online about the character within the Pokémon universe and franchise. This helped make the final composite look more realistic when combined onto the final action plate within Nuke.

This character was heavily researched and referenced, taking images that would inform my decisions on which animal anatomy the fictional model is made up of.

This model was then imported into ZBrush so that sculpting could be done, which I immediately began to use my body anatomy references, for this character, I made sure to use larger body model types, in order to more accurately create parts where the body fat may lie on a real-life equivalent.

The finer sculpting details within ZBrush were exported as a displacement map in order to keep the details without making the polycount any higher.

From there it was re-imported into Maya for the UVs & UDIM creation in order to maximise the possible quality of each each tile that can be painted.

Also within Maya the Rigging and Weight Painting was also done using mGear and ngSkinTools in order to make these two processes slightly more easy as the toolset offered by these two plugins are good and versatile.

The wireframe contrasted against the final Beauty Render which features multiple Maps exported from Substance Painter, including Roughness, Metallic, and of course the painted base colour.

A view of the Rig and Weight Paints created for the model. Made using ngSkinTools and mGear.

A process view showcasing the 4 UDIM tiles I created within Maya, and then painted on and added detailing to in Substance Painter. Definitely lots of optimisations could be done to these UV Islands.

A ZBrush Turntable of the final sculpt, separate layers were utilised in order to create the Displacement Map details, and so that the head blend shape could be exported for Maya.