Steampunk Girl

In this project, I will mainly discuss about how the workflow was like when creating Steampunk Girl project -- from 2D concept art coming to life as a fully rendered 3D character.

Gathering Concepts & References:

When it comes to art, I learned the most important thing to do before I do anything else is collecting concept arts and gathering references for those. I originally had no idea on what to create, but I remembered that I had found and gathered several concept arts from amazing artists on Artstation before. So I decided to use them and pick one for the class, in which I chose Steampunk Girl concept art by Hema in the end.

After I chose my concept art, I spent time collecting references from various websites and putting all of them together. I did not intend to gather those in one try, but rather collected them as I was observing and breaking down the concept art into pieces of what I needed to do. I mainly focused on the art style I was specifically going for this project.

Blocking In, Sculpting, & Detailing:

With all the information I needed, next step was pretty apparent to me. I used Maya, ZBrush, and Marvelous Designer all simultaneously to start blocking in and sculpting. During this process, I was less worried about detailing and instead focused on the major features like silhouette and character resemblence because I believe they are the most important things when it comes to creating a likeable character. For detailing, I basically duplicated my low poly meshes, made them into high polys, and started sculpting manually all the realistic features like cloth wrinkles using the references I had gathered before.

Topologizing, Edge Flowing, & UV Unwrapping:

When sculpting was almost finished, I started caring about topology and the edge flow. Although the character would not be used in anything professionally, I tried to use what I learned about the professional work pipeline and ensured that the model's topology was clean and optimized for deformation (for posing later). I used both Maya and ZRemesher on inanimate objects, and ZWrap for head and body topology using base mesh with good topology I have made before. After that came the most dreadful part of modeling for me -- UV unwrapping. I spent a few days UV unwrapping all the meshes, pushing myself over the limit and envisioning how it will look like later.

Baking & Texturing:

After UV unwrapping was finished, I started bringing UV unwrapped meshes into Substance Painter with different set materials and baked high polys that I have sculpted before. Subsequently, I referenced heavily back on the reference collection that I have made with the intention of creating realistic textures onto my stylized character. My thought process and intention during this process was that I wished to create a lively character that could exist in semi-realism. With texturing finished, I imported all of them into the Maya real-life size scale scene and started look-deving, adjusting with pre-existing Maya nodes.

　　　　　　Ex. of texture maps I have made and used for this project.

Hair Making:

X-Gen was the most challenging, yet fun part for me. Prior to using X-Gen, I had a brief knowledge of Yeti. Even though I could use Yeti for this project, I realized that Yeti license was not free outside of school, hence X-Gen was the only option for me post-graduate. I quickly taught myself how to use X-Gen from the tutorials, friends, and instructors. Additionally, I used some other features like fur and fibermesh to give the coat raggedy-look. Although it was not a one-step process, but I enjoyed it every time the grooming got updated.

Lighting:

I knew from the start of my school that lighting would extremely be useful to me as a 3D artist. With the knowledge I have acquired from the school, I created the lights with the aim of bringing them into life. During the process, I had to manually create light blockers and unlink lights for the light reflections/shadows to stay on/off where I wanted them to be, respectively.

Look Dev-ing & Post-Processing:

For this project, I had to experiment with settings to get the desired quality with AOV passes. Afterwards, I imported .exr files into Nuke to composite with the goal to put the character in a setting where sun is setting.

And lastly, here is the result.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Happy Modeling!