Night Guy

Some different angles

Xgen setup

Final Comp. Deciding if I should do multiple angles or not. If I do I will keep the images far more simple. Literally re-watched the episode to see if the moon was red so don't at me on that.

Thanks for sticking through to the end of this whole thing. Please leave your feedback. 

Naruto is gonna always be in my heart forever. Plus, everyone knows they lost it when Guy pulled this technique out. So I am setting off on an ambitious project to CG it up on this epic part in Naruto history.

First blockouts are hard, especially if you, like me, have never tackled accurate anatomy before. This could've been better but it isn't bad and my references were great. I used an anatomy book and photos of Usain Bolt in the starting position because the pose was so similar.

This is the "Final Sculpt" minus the tertiary details for skin and veins. I later looked at references from the Hulk because he is the ultimate go to for exaggerated muscles and forms. If I ever end up sculpting a ripped woman, She-Hulk will be my go to. 

After exporting the essential maps from ZBrush I went into substance painter to get to texturing. I usually use Mari for my humanoid characters because of the UDIM advantage (yea I know substance NOW has UDIM support YAY). I try to make the program do the work for me though and I think the result is nice. It could be better but below are the first and basically final passes for texture of the skin.

So, by "do the work for me" I mean I make it procedural-ish. I start with a base color, then use maps and other utilities from ZBrush or native to Substance to add darker and lighter values. This then gets repeated for roughness, and specularity. Off to Maya to get our first bits of look dev in.

During the look-dev process I like to use a simple studio HDRI to test materials. The reason being is that your materials must look good regardless of lighting, so why not use a ground truth lighting setup to test things out? Again though, I am trying to do as  little work as possible so almost every material outside of skin is procedural via the Maya and Arnold shader utilities. 

I usually start with an all black model to do specularity and roughness checks on. This shot came before I remembered to tie my curvature map from ZBrush into the mix but The result without it and was not terrible. It may not be physically accurate but it makes for a visually appealing specular breakup.

At this point, we need groom and some CFX to call things done. I decide to tackle the groom first because it's probably been a year since I have groomed anything.

After reworking the groom here a bit I add the super insane bushy brows to the bushy  brow sensei. Then I add some rocks to sell the "this guy is about to go off" effect and use some very simple Bifrost sims to test the smoke effect.