Satsuma Samurai

Hi
Im currently enrolled as a 1st year at The Animation Workshop. This piece was made over 4 weeks. Our directives were to make a bipedal character, and render it in Arnold with a basic clay shader. This was my first time doing a proper character production, it was an extremely rewarding course.

A large credit to our instructors/teachers:

Kenny Anderson carrying concepting, and Pat Imrie untangling the 3d workflow in ZBrush and Maya.

Doing concepting, I gathered and familiarized myself, with the clothing and armor I was going to replicate.  Gathering inspiration from other artists (David Benzal and John Powell) and deciding on a reference for the facial sculpt (Hiroyuki Sanada).

1. Initially I blocked out a bipedal basemesh, it was a brief directive that this had to be done in Maya. With the basemesh completed I had the right scale and proportions to continue my work in ZBrush.

I defined and implied the larger muscle groups, and made sure they were placed correctly to the best of my ability. With my design being fairly realistic, I tried to stay as true to normal proportions as possible, albeit a bit ripped. 

2. Remeshing this high poly dynamesh, and taking a more manageable "midtier" model into Maya, I started retopologizing. Adding loopcuts in the right places to accommodate potential deformation. During this stage I also modelled and unwrapped most of the additional assets I needed.

3. After this stage I exported everything back into ZBrush, and projected the details from the highpoly dynamesh sculpt unto the new and cleanly retopologized model, that now had subdivision levels. After cleaning the projections, I added some of the more symmetrical details to the sculpt before proceeding to posing.

After posing, I placed the hardsurface objects, added ropes, sculpted final detail and added the micro details with the noisemaker. Having the time I would like to explore nanomesh for chainmail, and redo the UVs for some of the posed cloth to get a better result with the noisemaker.

Exporting the lowpoly posed mesh back into Maya for rendering, and applying the maps created from the highpoly sculpt, back in ZBrush I rendered the turntable. I used FlippedNormals lighting scenes package to explore different light setups in Arnold, I had to get familiar with legacy render layers, but it was very handy nonetheless.

Thank you for taking a peek at my project :)

- Peter Holton