Aelin (Throne Of Glass Project)

Throne Of Glass Project

Why I chose this project

Since I was little I’ve always loved fantasy novels and last year I stumbled upon a series called Throne Of Glass by the author Sarah J. Maas. Saying I fell head over heels for this series would be an understatement so, some time later, I decided to create a fanart of Aelin, one of the characters, translating it into a 3D format.

It has been a long project, filled with new achievements, very poor choices and various mistakes, but now that it's finished, I’m quite proud of the results.

The programs I used are: Maya (hard-surface props, lighting, shading and rendering (Arnold)), Zbrush (sculpting and clothes simulation) Substance Painter, After Effects and Photoshop.

The process

Not having any real 2d concept for the character I perused the books to understand her physical appearance. Then I made my own concept.

Initially I was leaning towards a realistic approach.

Initial sculpting:

Retopology:

Textures:

Clothes and various groom tests:

Final renders:

Trial and error

That’s when I changed my mind. In itself the model didn’t look too bad to me, but I wasn’t satisfied at all. So, I decided to change the style of my model and make it more cartoonish.

All things considered, I should have done it sooner, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to experiment with grooming in x-gen.

I reused and adjusted the face and retopologised models I already had to optimise the process.

I used the standard female body from Zbrush as my starting point, modifying it according to the needs of the character.

I started working on the props and clothes, starting from a rough sketch

It was a challenging process because the character had many layers of clothing and I kew that, although making her visually interesting, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible for the posing process later on ( not having a rig to bind the model to).

After creating the uvs, I exported the caracter to Substance painter. As for the texture style I tried different solutions but ultimately landed on a mixed style with a realistic material base overlayed with stylized bits like the lineart on the face and the color splotches here and there.

Once I was satisfied with the outcome, I imported the model on Zbrush and posed it.

Then I created a render scene in maya with better lights and background and rendered both t-pose and posed models, focusing on beauty, albedo, ambient occlusion and wireframe passes.

Once composited, this was the final result.

Hope you like it :)