Johnny Silverhand Fanart by Boyadjian Lucas

Hello Everyone!

My name is Lucas, a senior student from Brassart Montpellier's School. For my final year, I've decided to focus with my mentors on the biggest project I've ever made, which is a big fanart of Johnny Silverhand, made in the most realistic way possible with my actual level of expertise.

This was a very challenging project with a lot of steps and software used, but I'm very happy with the result I can show you today.

This project was made completely from scratch, from sculpting the entire basemesh to the Keanu Reeves likeness sculpt, the modeling of the arm in Maya using Polygon modeling, and of course the Lookdev and lighting process.

During this very long piece of work, I've learned a lot of techniques and workflow steps from my mentors, and managed to progress significantly in anatomy and using a large number of software. Indeed, I've had the opportunity to work with Zbrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, R3DS Wrap, Vface models, Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop, and finally Vray.

I sincerely hope that you like what you see. It goes without saying that it took me a serious amount of time, effort, and dedication to present this artwork to all of you, but I'm really grateful for this opportunity offered by the Rookies platform. So, thanks to everyone on the staff for organizing this amazing contest!

I wish you a very pleasant day.

Artistically yours,

Lucas

Let me talk to you about my breakdown. 

For this project, I had two mentors. Clara Vicedomini, senior chara modeler that worked on movie productions for the past years, and Nicolas Polyte, ex senior chara artist at Unit Images in Paris. Their advices and their patience helped me and my few colleagues in a very meaningful way, I can't thank them enough for their time.  

The first step for me was to get as many references pictures I could get. As Johnny Silverhand is an existing character based on a living person, finding a lot of references was pretty easy, even if it took me some time to get some really good ones. 

Once the references were good and my mentor gave me her approval, the first step was to create an entire basemesh. Thanks to that, I'd be able to start sculpting with a good anatomical basis, and I'd be able to have a starting point for my future characters, Which is a very nice thing to have. 

Once this was done, the next part was the retopology of the basemesh. This was sincerely a hard part for me to make, because it was my first character ever. I was basically learning the techniques at the same time that I had to do the actual job. A bit of a challenge, but I've managed to finish it. I made the UV's at the same time, so that the character would be ready for the next step : the resculpt. 

At this point, I've started to enter the major part of the process, the anatomical study and the Keanu Reeves Likeness. it clearly was the longest part of the process. After all,  to sculpt in order to have a character looking like and existing person is clearly a meticulous, challenging work. 

First of all, my main focus was on the body. I read anatomy books, searched for a lot of references on the web, looked at the pictures I took, and body part after body part, retake after retake, I've managed to get a body that was more accurate.

The next step, and not the easiest one, was to create Johnny's famous cyber arm. For that part, I've decided to work on Maya, and I've modeled the parts for the left arm itself. Thanks to the Quad Draw tool, I was able to maintain the size of the arm while efficiently creating fibers, armor plates, and the fingers. I used curve extracts for the cables, and since the concepts and screens don't show the entire elbow, I opted to design a system that resembles the official concept.

Now that the body and the arm were complete, the next step was the face. It was at this precise moment that I began my second mentorship with Nicolas Polyte, a former senior character artist at Unit Images. This marked the beginning of the project's transition into the realm of realism. With Nicolas, we began by refining the body with intricate details. During the initial weeks of the mentorship, we dedicated a significant amount of time to achieving a strong likeness, aiming to create the best portrait possible within our limited timeframe.

Afterwards, we decided to take a break from focusing on the likeness and shifted our attention to another significant aspect of the character: his clothing. Johnny Silverhand is known for his iconic pair of leather jeans and a tank top featuring the logo of his fictional band in the game. My aim was to create these assets in the most realistic way possible, which led me to choose Marvelous Designer for the task.

We were briefly introduced to this software during our five-year course at Brassart, but it was during my second and third year that I extensively worked with it. I was drawn to the incredible possibilities it offered for rendering realistic clothing in a simple yet highly effective manner. It was an obvious choice for bringing Silverhand's clothing to life.

Once the simulation part of the project was done and the UV's done with Marvelous Designer, the next part was the export to Zbrush and sculpting the many layers of details needed to bring them to life. 

Then I went back to sculpting the likeness. With the advices of Nicolas and a certain amount of time, I've managed to obtain a pretty good portrait of the actor. Obviously, without the real hair, eyebrows etc, it was a bit hard to be certain of the result, yet I thought the level of likeness was ok at this point. 

Then came the really hard part of the process... The wrapping of details. I've used Vface in order to achieve the best level of realism I could have for this model. But Vface models have their own topology and UV's, so in order to get those details on my character, Nicolas introduced me to R3DS wrap. 

From here, after a big course made by my mentor of the software's workflow, I've started by transferring the Vface model's topology on my likeness, then all I had to do was to import the model's displacement maps on Zbrush, project the details of skin pores and wrinkles on my character on a new layer, and that was it, the model's face was ready. 

The next part was to do the exact same thing with a scanned body mesh, and finally I've merged the two topologies on Maya. As the UV's were intact, all that was left to do was a cleaning of the basecolor on Substance painter and Adobe Photoshop, in order to hide the color transition from the body to the face and clean the acne spots the Vface model had. 

In the meantime, I've created some alphas of Johnny's Tattoos  with Photoshop, and drew them on substance painter. 

Now that the body was merged with the face, and the skin color was matched between the two details projections on the model, it was time to start the texturing process with Substance painter. First of all, the pair of jeans, then the tanktop, and finally, the shoes. 

After the clothes were done, the biggest texturing work left was the mechanic arm. I've been very careful to reproduce as many details as I could, and it took me a few days to have a version I was satisfied of. 

Finally the project is starting to look like something ! Next step was to setup a Maya scene for the lookdev, and my mentor gave me one that was really functionnal and practical. Only problem, the lights themselves were compatible with Arnold Renderer, yet I wanted to work on Vray, which is my favorite render software. I've made a new lighting setup for the scene that was compatible with Vray, and we were good to go. 

Afterwards, I was busy creating the materials, exporting the maps and plugging the nodes for a few days straight, but the project really started to look like it was ready to get to the next level. 

After all my main materials were finished, it was time for the hair ! For that I went for the easy solution, X-gen. I've learned how to use it for my graduation movie last year, and I found it very convenient (buggy, yes, but convenient) 

That's it, finally, I'm ready for the first renders ! 

After setuping Vray and it's settings, I've started to test some IPR rendering. At first it war too slow for me, so I made a big cleanup of my scene, taking away some unused nodes, materials, histories. Afterwards, Vray was way faster and I've been able to take out the first shots of the character. 

While I was already super happy, with the result, I couldn't help but to want a cool posing for the character. As I'm not good at rigging, I asked a few friends of mine if they could do something simple for me just to pose the model, but they were really busy, it wasn't the right time. So I've searched the web for a solution and after a few days... I found one ! 

I've tried the software named Accurig, which is a free solution to help people in my case to make very simple rigs with controllers to put characters in pose, or give them simple animations they provide on their platform. 

Thanks to this, I've been able to make a cool pose... And here we are ! 

And that's it for this project. I waana thank you for your reading, thanks again to the rookies staff for providing us students with such great opportunities to show our beloved projects, and thanks again to my School Brassart Montpellier and my mentors for everything they made in order to make that character happen ! 

As a bonus, let me show you my Demoreel, based entirely on this character !

A very good day to you, fellow artist ! And see you very soon. 

Lucas