Ivan Lim - Odin, Journey as an Artist

Odin - Johnson Ting

Hello, my name is Ivan Lim. I am living in Singapore, and currently, I just graduated from Think Tank Training Centre (Online). I have been making Character Art for a couple of years now and am still in love with it! This is my Rookies Entry. I want to thank my amazing mentor Manuel Armonio for guiding me through making the best mentorship piece I can!

I found a stunning 2D concept of Odin by the amazing Johnson Ting on Artstation and knew that I had to make it in 3D.

For reference, I have the key components like facial references, armor and leather pieces, weapon parts, skin aging, rune designs on the shields and belts, etc.

This gives me an idea of the blockout phase of what they will look like before starting the piece.

I am a huge fan of the God of War games made by Santa Monica Studios and used a lot of the amazing work done by the artists at Santa Monica as a reference for the character!

For the blockout, we want to make sure that the character is on a real-world scale, which helps with correct lighting information, shadows, and SSS.

Subsurface Scattering is made for real-world scale, and if your object is too small, it could cause artifacts in the light transmission or give unexpected results.

I started with a scaled rectangular primitive model in Maya and brought it into Zbrush to scale the base mesh according to my desired scale of the rectangular primitive model.

For the highpoly stage, I am adding the secondary forms and much finer details. This stage is where the character starts telling a story through the different aging elements in the armor like scratches, dents, and damage.

Here is some information about the overall model.

The texturing phase is a fun part where you can start to see your character come to life in the render engine. I highly suggest starting to set up early basic first-pass textures in Substance and bringing it into the render engine to do some LookDev while texturing.

Going back and forth between texturing and LookDev is crucial for ensuring that your textures are on the right path. I always start by working with the base color, using different masks like your curvature, AO, and simple noises to add breakup in the color.

There are many different hair parts of this character: the beard, eyebrows, eyelashes, fur mantle, fur pouch, chest hair, and fur on the waist belt as well. I started with Xgen and rendered out different hair sets ranging from Opaque to flyaway hairs in Arnold.

I also used a software called “Fibershop” which speeds up the hair creation workflow.

You can make great-looking hair in an hour of tweaking a set of procedural parameters in the software. I highly recommend watching their YouTube tutorials on how to use their software.

The raven was not in the original concept, but I thought that having a raven next to Odin would bring more meaning to the character. The raven helps convey to the audience that it is not just a Norse warrior but Odin himself.

The base model of the bird was sculpted in Zbrush without its feathers. Then sculpting some feathers for different parts of the wings and baking the model down onto a flat plane to use them as textures in Substance Painter.

The lighting of the scene is pretty simple, consisting of a top-down key light, a fill light, and multiple rim lights. I added a couple more lights in the scene to bring the viewer’s attention to some parts of the assets.

The scene was Ray-traced and using ACES color space. After doing the final renders, I took them into Photoshop to do some color correction as well as some brightness and contrast tweaks.

My Journey as an Artist

Hello, I wanted to make a model that shows some key stuff about my journey as an artist. The bloodborne book was the first art book that I ever bought which I still have it till this day, Anatomy for sculptors was a book I studied that plays a key part in my journey as an artist as well. I also added a Think Tank Training Centre badge as I have just graduated from that amazing school which I learnt so much from all the supervisors, mentors and peers I met at Think Tank.

This piece was also a chance for me to improve my real time hair creation techniques. It was a blast making this piece and Thank you for looking!

Here is also the wireframe for the character, since it was a portrait of a character, I had more polygons.

I learnt alot from this project especially hair creation, I took time to learn the GS CurveTools which I highly recommend as it makes placing haircards so much smoother and much more enjoyable!

Thank you for looking through my Rookies Entry! Best of luck everyone!