The Worm Queen

This project is based on Pablo Sánchez's design. It was hard to choose which design to reproduce among all his propositions because I find his drawing style, which reminds me a lot of the aesthetics of Ghibli films, absolutely charming. I finally chose to make the 3D version of his character: The Queen.

Softwares used: Zbrush, Maya, Houdini, Substance painter, Nuke

Before starting the 3D process I first made some sketches of the character, notably of her face from other angles as well as a sketch over the original drawing to try to understand the general shape of the character as best as possible.

As for the rendering I intended to go for, I wanted to keep the shape of the character as much as possible but give her rather realistic textures. Even though on the original drawing, the scales are only suggested on her tail, I really wanted to experiment and give her a real “fish tail” with iridescent reflections.

I started by sculpting the body on Zbrush in Tpose. It took me less time than usual because I didn't have to sculpt the character's legs. On the other hand, I had to think about a suitable length for the tail given that in the base concept, it is rolled up on itself. So it was a little difficult to estimate its real size compared to the rest of the body. I then moved on to Maya where I did the retopology as well as all the elements she wears: the crown and the jewels. Since the character was not going to be animated I took the liberty of placing the bracelet around the tail after the posing to be sure to place it in the right place.

After that, I did the UVs, and the posing using a basic rig but quite functional for this pose. ( also, added her little water bubbles ! )

Then I started working on the textures on Substance Painter. I had a lot of fun texturing the different elements made of different materials. Until now, I hadn't had the opportunity to texture a skin shader for a character that didn't have a natural skin color. This proved to be a bit of a challenge later in dealing with subsurface scattering.

In addition, I really liked the fact of having to interpret what the realistic textures of a character who basically only existed in 2D with much more “cartoon” textures could look like.

After finalizing the textures on Substance, I plugged them into Maya. I then alternated between the two software in order to make some adjustments

Then came the biggest challenge for me, the scales. I knew I didn't want to do them in displace because I wanted them to be well defined and look like they were independent of the body like real fish scales. So I decided to do them on Houdini. My goal was to have very small scales on the belly, large scales towards the middle of the tail and small scales at the end of the tail. So I created a system which allowed me to populate the mesh of my tail, with the meshes of the scales that I had created previously, by indicating with an attribute that the scales had to be larger where the mesh was the largest and smaller scales where the mesh was tightest. I played arround a bit the the scales thickness and size then I exported them as an alambic that I imported on Maya. 

For the iridescent side of the scales, I simply used the Thin Film option in Maya's AiStandard Surface and added a little metalness, which gave me exactly the effect I wanted.

Finally, I created a base with sand already present in the original drawing, which would help me a lot to make the animated turn of the character. After that I just had to add a small set with a background, some lights and tadaa the queen was good to go!