The [F]lower - A Drakengard 3/NieR:Automata Project (fanart)

The [F]lower

A project based around creating Zero from Drakengard 3 in the style of NieR: Automata

Copyrights for Drakengard 3 and NieR: Automata both belong to Square Enix, and the original concept for Zero was created by artist Kimihiko Fujisaka. Anything related to the games and the concept of Zero belongs to the original creators!

As a character artist in my final year of university, I've spent the last year refining my portfolio to get it to a higher standard. For my final year project, I wanted to create a model based around one of my passions that would help me refine my skills. What I eventually settled on was a project based around the Drakengard/NieR series, with the plan being to make a Drakengard character in a style influenced by NieR: Automata. This was influenced by the visual upgrades made for the remaster of the original NIER, NieR Replicant 1.22..., as visual changes were made that made it more visually consistent with Automata's art style. 

I gathered a lot of research in the early stages of the project, including (but not limited to) character references, art style references, material breakdowns and workflow research (of course, only a small amount of these could be included here)

The high poly sculpt of the model was created in Zbrush, with the clothing being mostly created in Marvelous Designer and hard surface elements being created using Zbrush and 3ds Max. I ended up closely referencing to 2B's model to start with and then diverging from this to create a character that looked more like Zero, adjusting the face to get her features to show through.

Retopology was completed in Maya, with unwrapping being done in 3ds Max. The original plan was to complete all of this step in 3ds Max (as it is the software I used to use for this step) but after doing more research into Maya's tools, I ended up finding them much more efficient for the process. The final model (including hair cards, which were added later on) came to just under 67k polygons. My self imposed limit for this project was 70k based on my own research into Automata's models, so I was luckily able to keep within this limit.

Texturing was done in Substance Painter, with the model being baked in this software too. To get the face to look more Automata like, I ended up painting "makeup" onto the face. This seems to be an essential part of the Automata faces based on the original models, and was a big contributing factor to the final models fitting the art style. 

The real time groom was created using the method described in Maria Puchkova's FlippedNormals groom tutorial, which involves creating the hair cards using Xgen in Maya, baking them down using the Arnold Renderer and placing them using a tool like GS Curvetools to import into engine. As this was my first time creating a full groom using these tools, I took the chance to experiment with them and tried to replicate the "chunky" hair look a lot of the Automata models seem to have.

The final renders were completed in Unreal Engine 5, with the model being rigged and posed. I wanted to show off how my model looks in a real time setting, and so created a Niagara particle system for video renders too.