Sian Durler - 3D Character Art

Character Development: Charne ('strong but feminine')

The brief for this character design was to create a stylised bipedal character suitable for rigging and character performance. Students were given limitations, such as avoiding loose garments like skirts and dresses, to make their character suitable for a beginner rig. It was also important to create a character whose backstory and design were relevant to the local South African space.

My goal was to create a character that challenged gender stereotypes and diversified the representation of women in media.

Character Description

Occupation: High schooler and apprentice for her dad, an auto mechanic

Nationality: South African (Cape Town)

Age: 15

Character Hook: She is an auto mechanic in training and dreams of inventing a hovercraft that uses renewable energy to bring wealth to her financially struggling family, but her small physique makes it difficult for her live up to her big dreams.

Theme: Determination

3D Production Pipeline

Once the preproduction phase was complete, I began the journey of bringing Charne to life in 3D.  Firstly, I box-modelled my character in Autodesk Maya using my orthographic drawings as guidelines.  The next step was to texture her in Substance Painter and surface her in Autodesk Maya.  This was my favourite part of the pipeline; I chose to push myself and blended aspects of semi-realism, pop art and the well-known Borderlands style to create a new, unique visual style which can be seen in the close-up shots above.  After texturing and surfacing, I had to rig my character.  This was personally the most challenging part of the process for me as Charne's large hands and feet were difficult to achieve clean deformations on.  Finally, I created a workshop environment for my character portrait, which was lit using Arnold in Autodesk Maya and composited in Adobe After Effects (the process for this can be viewed at the top of this page).

Character Modelling: Annike and Adult Sheep (for my graduate film Counting Sheep)

My team was inspired by the painterly style of the animated series Arcane and I was tasked with creating characters that had a similar visual appearance.  I began by blocking out and sculpting the characters in Zbrush.  From there, I retopologised the characters in Autodesk Maya to make them suitable for rigging.  Displacement maps were generated from the sculpts to preserve the brushstroke detail and plane changes, which were an important base to create the painted appearance of the characters. 

Credits:

Character designs by Noah Ferris

Character rigs by Michaela-Lee Claassen

Character Texturing: Synne the Cloud Shepherd (for my graduate film Counting Sheep)

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of texturing Synne to have a hand-painted aesthetic. I began by setting up light generators in Adobe Substance Painter to create a generic top-down lighting effect as a base. I then carefully painted over the entire model in grayscale using the shadows and highlights from the light generators to guide my brushstrokes and values. Next, I used gradient maps to apply the base colours to the grayscale textures. Finally, I painted in additional detail such as freckles, scars and tattoos and added subtle colour variation on top to create the finished textures.

The hand-painted texturing and its role in the final surfacing of the character can be seen above.  Painted textures serve as an important base to create the 2D hand-painted style, which is enhanced with the use of a toon shader (as seen in the image labelled "Shading Pass").  In the images labelled "Diffuse Pass", no lighting information is shown- the shadows and highlights are all the result of carefully hand-painting the 3D model using the process detailed above.

Credits: 

Character design by Isabella Bosmos

3D model and sculpt by Jayden Welch

Base toon shader network by Ivan Nelson

Character rig by Dylan Greenwood

All images in the texturing research above belong to Fortiche, Loish and respective owners who uploaded their images on Google