Cull Obsidian VFX 3D Character

Cull Obsidian VFX Character 

This project has been made during my masters degree in organic modelling in Lightbox Academy. It was a 3 month project which at first, I didn't think I would be able to finish and upload, but here it is finally! I had to speed up renders and fix some changes fast before the entries closed. I will describe all these during the breakdown of the project.

Character reference and design

For this project, I wanted to make a fearful and attractive character with a lot of visible strong anatomy. I didn't want to make a recurring 3D model and I knew I had to model something that stood out but without being the main character of a film or series. This is why I chose Black Dwarf for it, or also known as Cull Obsidian, but I wanted to make it film different... another version of him with more visible anatomy and corpulence.

I started then to gather some references of the character in his early designs for the films. I found this early designs at Jerad's S. Marantz ArtStation page, character designer of many films such as Avengers Infinity War, Endgame, Spiderman Far from Home, No Way Home, Shang Chi...

Blocking and early sculpt

The blocking stage was a bit tough and the character had so many changes when I started to give detail. The blocking at first looked a little bit skinny for Cull Obsidian's anatomy, but I always trust the process, and it came out pretty well finally!. 

I then did an early retopology to work directly with subdivision levels. This is a different type of workflow I learned during the advanced module of the masters degree. Here's some work in progress I did during the detailing process.

Weapon, armor and cloth

Both weapon and armor were modeled directly in Maya. As I said at the beginning, I wanted to have a really visible anatomy of the character, but the final character design that made it to film production had an outfit that hid most of it out. This is why I did this armor pieces designed by Jerad S. Marantz.

The weapon was made piece by piece, and I gathered reference from Grifon, a Hard surface and weapon artist from ArtStation that made a fantastic and wonderful job modeling this weapon. And finally, the piece of cloth that Jerard's character design had was made in Marvelous Designer.

Topology

I also wanted to upload the final model topology. I had to use the model's second subdivision level because the first one didn't have enough detail for the displacement maps to work properly.

UVs

One of the most time consuming parts of the project was the UV mapping. The weapon and armor had so many pieces and duplicates. I used a maximum of 17 tiles for the whole character including armor, weapon, cloth, character body, fangs and eyes.

Displacement maps and detailing

One of the things I learned during this masters degree is the Geometry HD tool and displacement maps. At first I was a bit scared of applying GeoHD to the sculpt because it had a ton of geometry and it could crash due to memory problems. I just did one subdivision of it, but it was enough to emphasize all the little details of the character's skin. Here's some early displacement tests I did in Arnold along with the high detailed posed sculpt.

Texturing

One of the last and most important steps before the model was done is texturing. I knew I would have to make tons of color layers in order to make the texture feel organic. I used curvature and cavity maps for both colors and roughness layers, but most of these had to be done by hand painting.

Posing, lighting and rendering

The posing was done with Zbrush masks and Transpose master tool. Things like the torso, neck or legs rotation were easy to manipulate, but it started to get tough when I had to pose the hands, fingers or when I had to separate two clipped surfaces. I started with a more static pose, but I changed it slightly and modeled a little rock base where the character could lie his foot on

The lighting and render were made in Arnold inside Maya. I mostly did studio renders, but I also rendered with an exterior HDR obtained from poly haven to further see how the materials worked in an exterior ambient.

Final renders and results

For this project I used Zbrush for sculpting, Autodesk Maya for retopology, weapon and armor modeling, UVs and rendering, Marvelous designer for the cloth simulation, Adobe Substance 3D Painter for texturing and Fusion 17 for compo.

Thanks for reading!