Odei Arrizabalaga - Character Artist - 2023/2024

3D Character Artist 2023/2024 – Odei Arrizabalaga

Hello everyone! My name is Odei Arrizabalaga and I'm a 3D Character Artist from Spain. The presentation will go from the most recent work to the oldest. Explaining in detail every step I take in each of them. So, grab the seat and I hope you to enjoy the presentation.

The following artworks were created between late 2023 and February 2024.

VI: League of Legends - 3D Cinematic Model

I embarked on a project to recreate the character VI from League of Legends during the period from late 2023 to February 2024. My inspiration for this project stemmed from the 'Warriors' cinematic produced by Blur Studio for League of Legends, where I found myself captivated by the character Vi. Since then, I have been driven by a strong sense of inspiration to bring her to life through 3D modeling.

References

Sculpting

I didn't capture much of the modeling process, but I did focus on handcrafting the likeness in ZBrush. I undertook this to learn; however, nowadays, I highly recommend using VFace, as it's much more practical and realistic

Retopology and UVs

The primary objective is to achieve cinematic quality, so the topology isn't a major concern. In this instance, I successfully transferred from 7 million polygons to 700k.

Here they are all uvs.

Texturing

Before delving into this section, I employed the Amy Ash technique, a command in the Script editor section aimed at enhancing stability. This command prevents the material's image from updating in the Hypershade.

Here an example of the nodes I used to make the head textures inside Hypershade.

Now begins the fun part, bringing the character to life. Below you havesome photos of the entire process. Everything is done inside Substance Painter, and they are in 4k.

Grooming

For the grooming part, I used XGen. In this part, I had to meticulously save everything and make backups.  As many people know, XGen is notorious for ruining scenes or causing you to lose all the hair descriptions.

Rendering

In the render part, I used the GPU because I have a 3080 ti. There's a huge difference between rendering with GPU or CPU. Nowadays, what I recommend is rendering with GPU. My biggest issue with this is that I'm using the 2022 version of Maya, and well... it causes a lot of problems when rendering with GPU.

Diabolic Queen

I embarked on this project with the aim of enhancing the skin textures of characters. To achieve this, I found an excellent tutorial on Flipped Normals that teaches how to create realistic skin using Substance Painter.

The goal of this project was to showcase my skills in texturing and shading.

Chico (Metal Gear Fan Art)

Saurabh Jethani created some excellent tutorials on Substance Painter, demonstrating the techniques for texturing characters specifically for video games. 

Here is the result of applying what I learned from his guidance.

Mafia Toad

This project originated from a meme I saw on Twitter. My intention was to complete it in less than a week to challenge myself and see if I could accomplish it within that timeframe. Here is the result of my efforts. For the environment, I utilized Megascans to create a more realistic and immersive setting.

Reference

Special mention

Here, I have to wholeheartedly thanks Amy Ash and Jon Beeston for giving me incredible feedback, being so patient and kind with me. Without them the Vi project probably would have never seen the light of day.

There are not enough words to express my gratitude for everything you both have done for me. Therefore, I will simply say thank you, and I hope to work with both of you someday. I am where I am today thanks to those incredible cinematics. Simply, thank you.

I'll leave their ArtStation profiles under their names, and please follow them, they are amazing artists.
P.S.: Jon Beeston doesn't have an ArtStation, so I'll leave his LinkedIn and the ArtStation of Axis Studio.

To those who have reached this point reading, a thousand thanks as well. Your presence is immensely appreciated.