'Passion and Sacrifice' Character Art

'Passion and Sacrifice' Character Art

A journey of getting out of Darkness into the Light

Motivation

As a 19 years old living in the middle of nowhere and hoping to changes my passion towards art into a career is a dream for me, the driving force that made me start and finish this project was the difficulties I face currently in life, And using it as a way of guidance, learning and discovery.

References

The idea for the concept came from a Disney movie “Raya and the Last Dragon” specifically the underwater shot of Sisu. For the posing I took inspiration from dancers as they make really appealing poses and movements. Character design very much influenced by Disney look, I tried to find some more specific style choices through their art books and looked at work or some amazing character designers like Cory Loftis and Ami Thomson. The composition for the scene is inspired by WLOP.

Preproduction

There a few concepts the I needed to keep in mind regarding any element the exists in the scene.

• The concept of Straight Vs Curve

• “S” Curve

• Sharp Vs Smooth

• Light vs Dark

One of the most amazing Design Philosophy I have learned awhile ago is “The smaller is to the greater as the Greater is to the Whole” which simply means in this case the guidelines I made for myself mentioned above are going to be applied from the smallest detail and to the whole character and the entire scene and composition, in order to create consistency between each element and make each element of art harmonize with each other. another part of the composition was to split the Scene to Foreground, Background and mid-Ground and connects them with the elements in the composition in order to create Depth.

I try to draw even if I can’t, this makes the whole processes a bit digestible for my brain. And as you can see all of this concepts applied well in the final render.

Production

Character Modeling and Look Dev :

I used Zbrush, Blender and Marvelous designer for this project. The Character starts off with block out and getting refined and refined throughout the process. My favorite part of sculpting is the face. After getting to a decent stage at concept sculpt I retopologized the character in Blender. I poly painted it making sure to add color vibration and keeping in mind the color tints for each zone in the face and body.

I initially wanted to do half character but realized it would better serve the composition if I do the whole character, I sculpted and retopologized the legs separately and joined it to the body with zmodeler brush in zbrush. The posing was done in zbrush using transpose master and sculpted back some details.

I wanted to get good quality from the details from her body and face specifically the scares so I took advantage of UDIM workflow.

For the scars on her hand is sculpted simply by enabling color on dam-standard brush in zbrush, again I made sure even the scares follow the concept of smooth curves that flow into each other nicely. The Color and normal maps were exported from zbrush using Multimap exporter. her Hair shading is done procedurally using an object node and connected the random value to a color range to assign different color to each clump of hair in order to add the color vibration.

Garments :

Used Marvelous Designer for getting a quick start on the Cloth, then I imported it to zbrush and zremeshed it and sculpted back some details and folds into the cloth plus added some sense of movement and flowy gesture.

The texturing for the cloth is a mix of procedural and images textures, I used fabric pattern from megascans roughness map as a height map and also separated the horizontal and vertical lines in it to use it as a mask for assigning two different materials for the cloth one normal fabric and another one for golden shiny metallic.

Creating Environment

Water :

Caustics were one of the most challenging part of the project but even more the prism Distortions in a transparent object like water, which Blender’s Cycles render engine doesn’t have any feature for simulating distortion prism in a glass shader.

Blender Have a new Feature called Shadow Caustics which basically works by creating caustics from the shadow by looking at the shape of the object. It isn’t physically accurate but it is fast to render.

I mixed this technique with traditional way of creating caustics with gobos (adding a water caustics shaped alpha texture to the light in order to create water light like patterns).

The Hard part was the Distortion prism in the water, how I did it is in the shading by separating the RGB channels and assigned a different IOR (Index of refraction) for each channel and Scaled it down with a White Noise Texture (a node in blender that assign different value “0 - 1” for each pixel in the shader). Then the difference between the Object IOR and IOR shift of RGB Channels Creates a Dispersion on the Glass and then it is controlled by the Fresnel node with accurate IOR to only apply it on the edges of the object. 

As New Blender 4 got Light linking feature I was so excited to try. because the water surface won’t pass much light from it I made collections for each group “Character, Background, Foreground, and Water”

The Character was put in a separate Light Group and Lights were categorized as Main Light, Rim Right, Color Vibrant Lights and Shape Reveling lights, which were lighted in way to reveals Form and Shapes in order to make in not fade into the background and neither disconnect from it. This method was the same for other collections as well.

Postproduction

Of course the project has gone through many iterations but in the final render a small amount of lens distortion and bloom was added to the image and tweaked the exposure and contract a little bit in the blender compositing.