Daniela – Real-time character

Welcome to my entry!

I learned 3D for films in school and this year I wanted to learn 3D for games. And since I also wanted to try making a realistic character, it was the occasion to do both!

I took the actress Daniela Melchior for references, and for clothes, I went for a concept by John Dimayuga inspired by the game Detroit: Become Human.

I gathered a lot of pictures of the actress to help during the sculpting and of fabrics for the clothes. I also collected images from the game Detroit: Become Human since it was one of my inspirations for this project.

I started from scratch on ZBrush for the modeling. 

Then, I used 3DCoat to do the retopology.

I did the baking and texturing on Adobe Substance Painter. Since I was used to Mari, there was a time of adjustment with the software, but I enjoyed learning how to work with it.

For the skin, I first painted the mesh with colors only, to have the tints for the skin like redness, and blueness around the eyes, ... After, I projected cross-polarized skin textures, and added all the details with displacements textures from Texturing.xyz

I learned to do grooming with Yeti, but I had never done hair before. It was a great challenge to work on it. Same for the peach fuzz.

I made the shading and rendering by following the article "How to Create Realistic Hair, Peach Fuzz, and Eyes" on the Marmoset website. I also used the eye mesh the artist is giving in it.

I separated the jacket from the top, and the overpants from the pants in the UVs, so when the character doesn't wear them, the engine doesn't need to calculate it.

Now, about how much time I took for this project. I think I took 450-480 hours to do it. Overall, I met almost all of my deadlines. I did take more time on the retopology and the hair. But since it was my first time on both, I didn't realize at the time I had done my schedule how long it would take. And I took also a few more days for the last corrections on the character.

I am really happy about this project since I learned a lot. I had never done this kind of realism for a character and it was my first time making retopology and working on Marmoset and Substance Painter. I also never had done until now real-time rendering.

I think I need to optimize more the UVs to be better for a game process, but now I understand better how to work on this kind of project and I am looking forward to doing another project like this!

Thank you for your attention, have a nice day!