Realistic Cubone (Pokémon)

My Final project for my Second and final year of my Motion Graphics and Animation course at the Belfast Metropolitan Collage. This required us to make a life like version of a Pokémon based of the visual style of the Detective Pikachu film. 

This is my reference board, showing all my 2D and 3D inspiration that helped be decide how the character should look, from block outs to real creature as well and official and fan depictions of Cubone. Having a full reference board was invaluable to deciding how i should turn a cartoon design into a life like model, for example the official cubone design has a simple 1 toe foot that is a simple triangle so i researched into lizard claws and took inspiration from the iguana claw which i modified into a 2 toe foot which blended the triangle original design with the iguana foot.

A turntable to show the evolution of my model as it went though iterations. Made using Zbrush. 

This was my first time using Zbrush to make a model from start to  finish i took to liking the software quite quickly and my model improved overtime as i learned more about the software's features. When I completed my model it was a very high poly model each sub-tool had Six subdivisions creating around 44 Million polygons for the entire piece. Software's like Maya which we Animated in would struggle to handle a model of that size so we created displacements maps in Zbrush so we could animate with the model at its lowest subdivision then when it renders in Arnold at the end of this process the model would look like its highest poly version. 

This process speed up the animation and rendering process a lot and it was achieved long before the animation process started.

Interactive version of my model. This well allow you to examine the detail of my model up close.

After fixing the topology and created stable UVS in Maya we transferred our model into Substance Painter. first off we created Normal Maps in Zbrush and Baked them into the Substance Painter texture then we used PBR textures to created designs that would interact with light more realistically then regular textures. I wanted to keep the basic colour Pallet accurate to the original design so i used a colour picker to gather the colour codes for the Nintendo design and applied them to my textures.

This was the Unreal Engine level I made to create a blackout animation inside of.  The level was made from community and copyright free assets and materials.  This scene was designed to recreate the basic layout for the background plate of our animation so we could place our Previs Animation inside it.

I used a Mgear rig and then modified the amount of fingers, toes and added a tail. Mgear was useful as i could keep the template in place delete the rig adjust it as need then rebuild the rig in only a few minutes. Mgear also has a handy drop down tab that lists your joints so you can grab joints that maybe obscured at the time.

This is my Lighting setup using a Arnold Skydome and a IBR to give the entire scene the basic lighting required before adding more Arnold render lights in the exact places seen in the background plate. The lighting was important to be able to get a reflection pass when we rendered out the animation.

When we rendered out of Maya we used Arnold to  create 4 Render Passes, beauty pass, shadow pass, reflection pass and Alpha reflection pass. This game me more control over the compositing in Nuke as I could rotoscope blur and merge passes separately before bringing them together in the final viewer.

This is my Final Project completed and fully composited in nuke before being reinserted around the rest of the footage.