Jerusalem's Lot - A short story from Stephen King's "Night Shift"

Calvin McCann - The religious manservant

Calvin McCann is a character of the short story "Jerusalem's Lot". He is the manservant of the main character Charles Boone, and follows him into the abandoned town of Jerusalem's Lot. He is described as educated, very religious and loyal.

Lighting and rendering in Maya using Redshift, modeling in Maya, sculpting in ZBrush, texturing in Substance Painter.

Close-up and turnaround of the A-posed character.

Addition of the posed character in the abandoned church of Jerusalem's Lot.

Another shot of the posed character holding an oil lantern in his right hand and a rosary in his left hand.

Hypotethical picture taken at that time (1850s), assembled in Photoshop to give it that vintage and sepia look.

I created the clothes in Marvelous Designer and retopologized them in TopoGun 3, since I don't really like the retopology tools in Maya. By being symmetrical the patterns, I only retopologized the left part, then to mirror it later in Maya. Notice that I exported the meshes with UVs, from Marvelous.

Once I had the retopologized patterns exported from TopoGun, by having used Marvelous patterns as live surfaces, I reimported them in Maya together with Marvelous meshes. Then I proceeded to transfer world UVs first, from Marvelous patterns to the retopologized ones. And finally I transferred the vertex position from Marvelous 3D mesh to the retopologized patterns to get the final 3D mesh of the clothes. As for the final touches, I combined the pieces based on my needs and merged the vertices.

I made the rosary chain wrapped around the hand using curves, sweep mesh and MASH in Maya. Also a couple of normal maps, of the shirt or the gilet for example, I baked them in Marmoset Toolbag because of the skew painting tool to get rid of some artifacts.

ZBrush clay and polypaint views. I sculpted Calvin's body and the refined Marvelous clothes in ZBrush. About the accessories like the bag and the flask, I modeled them in Maya.

To pose Calvin, since I am not a good rigger, I quickly rigged it using Advanced Skeleton, meaning I had to quickly skin it too and for this task I used ngSkinTools. Both done in Maya.

I collected some useful references for this project to have a more defined idea about this character. Note that these served as general guidelines for pre-production and production phases.

Some of my sketches for this character. Drawing my ideas down not helped me out visualizing better the figure of Calvin, also establishing a color palette and materials caps allowed me to work faster later when texturing.

The Worm - The ancient creature

The Worm is a character of the short story "Jerusalem's Lot". It is the ancient evil creature symbol of the reincarnation of the myth of Cthulhu, summoned by Charles Boone when visiting the abandoned church of Jerusalem's Lot with his manservant Calvin McCann.

Lighting and rendering in Maya using Redshift, modeling in Maya, sculpting in ZBrush, texturing in Substance Painter.

Addition of The Worm in the abandoned church of Jerusalem's Lot and scene of the encounter with Calvin.

ZBrush clay view. I sculpted The Worm in ZBrush taking advantage of radial simmetry

Besides sketching my subject matter as usual, before doing that for this creature, I wanted to practice some concept sculpting. You can consider this creature the prototype of the final worm.

Some of my sketches for this creature. Drawing my ideas down always help me out visualizing everything better, also establishing a color palette allowed me to work faster later when texturing.

Abandoned Church - Abode of "The worm that doth corrupt"

In Stephen King's short story, Jerusalem's Lot is a deserted village, more precisely a mysterious area townsfolk avoid. The menservant Calvin McCann, together with the main character Charles Boone, decide to visit it.  

So based on this part of the story, I chose to create the abandoned church of that area, in which I added my creature of The Worm and my character of Calvin McCann. 

Lighting and rendering in Maya using Redshift, modeling in Maya, texturing in Substance Painter and Substance Designer.

Some of the props from my scene.

A couple of examples of maps created from both baking high-poly information onto low-poly and manual texturing. The way I texture props is non-destructive, meaning I use fill layers and smart masks wisely avoiding wasting time on painting details again in case some changes are required.

I created the floor and walls material in Substance Designer, then modified it in Substance Painter after having exposed the parameters needed.

A very short breakdown on how I implemented AI in this project, generating only the three cursed paintings for my "Jerusalem's Lot" scene using StableDiffusion Web-UI and ControlNet script. I wanted to keep the subjects' pose from real and existing paintings like "Madonna of Roses" of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, then to bring the generated images into Substance Painter to add more complexity and detail to get the final result (right image, 3D model + textures).

DISCLAIMER: this is the only AI-generated content of the whole project and a new step I wanted to try to implement in my workflow, as these three paintings are of secondary importance.

The area of the map I decided to focus on, Jerusalem's Lot deserted village. I drew this map together with a friend of mine, Mattia Zanetti, after both of us had read meticulously this short story to extract as much information as possible. He doesn't have a Rookie account, so I'll leave his ArtStation link here as a sign of gratitude: https://www.artstation.com/mattiazanetti

As usual references and sketches to have a good idea on how to start the project.

Thank you if you have reached this point and you have looked through the whole project. Your time and consideration are precious to me! :)

This project overall has been a challenge for me, especially because of the short amount of time I had to conclude everything. Have a nice day!