Julio Del Rio - Character Submission

First up is Potentilla, the last human character I made. Her name means strength that comes from within. I wanted to create a sort of anti-hero, almost villanous character that is set in a futuristic setting. Each one of her elements were determined to bring a certain feel to the audience. I selected each component based on her story, personality, and gameplay (like if I were to implement her in a game). 

To me her mask was the main inspiration for this piece, I wanted to give kinda the effect bane from the batman series has to her design. This brought to some iterations and early concepts as to what effect it could create and how it would look.

As you can see, this helped shape into the final design slowly but surely, and also gave me a chance to test out shaders. I was unfamiliar with doing liquids so I had to create extra geo for refractions in different parts.

By this time I had already fleshed a bit of her background, Her hair was a massive selling point for me which is how I ended up on the twin fishtail hairstyle, as it suit  her perfectly. With this I also made the first sketch of her suit. I wanted to make a character that works at dark areas and this was the result

After many iterations the last touch was some personality on the garments. I wanted to convey her puertorrican descent a bit more and her personality fit really well with el "Vejigante" a local puerotrrican folklore character. I explored t where this could be symbolized and the hood ended up being the best part to do so.

This area also went through iterations, At some point it became too much and I was advised to tone it down since most of my final shots were too dark anyways, but overall I'm happy with the final results.

My last Project in Gnomon was a Dragon, one of my goals before graduating was creating one of these massive beasts. This project pushed me mostly in my texturing, I probably grew more in the 3 weeks I made this than in 6 months. He started out from an artwork made by Polar Engine, but as he developed I wanted to give my own take and he slowly changed. Here are the shots with neutral lighting in V-ray

While I was texturing I did many render tests and had created a setup which our Profesor Miguel Ortega had taught us in Foundry Nuke and v-ray. This led to relatively quick view of what the final image would look like and since it was so flexible, I could comp a singular image and then render a turntable, and almost everything would work flawlessly

The third piece is one of my favorites. This was the piece which helped me overcome my biggest obstacle as an artist. The quality of what I would make did not improve for a long time, until I made this one. Professor Tran Ma would review my work weekly and with such precision I could finally figure out my shortcomings were when creating artwork, she changed the way I tackle my work and it shows in this final output.

There were a lot of things I tried for the first time with this artwork. First was conveying a moment, my storytelling skills have been lackluster so after much thought I realized that if I try to convey one scene this will level up said storytelling skill. The story not only told through the character, but on the environment as well, from the symbolism of the white rose petals, to the bowl of eaten fruit, there's a few elements to help ground the  story in this aspect.  From that it eventually expanded to me realizing what her personality, situation, background, actions, and much more was for this character.

This was also the first time I tried to texture in MARI, and render a character in v-ray. I wanted to make a shader in Autodesk Maya which would let me change roughness values of different areas on the fly and save time from going back and forth. What I did was create masks using RGB channels in MARI and plug them into a Layered texture. Here is the setup I did for all her texturing. 

The last part to her design was her Hair, I wanted to convey a background of noble blood, but also try to get the viewer to think something along the lines of, "But if so why is she there, she doesn't seem like a noble" Her best feature for this was her hairstyle. This was also a first for me as I had to learn how to make braids and how create CG Hair using Yeti. It was super fun and I was mentored by Jackson Lucas who is wonderful at teaching. these are the results I had for my first time tackling this.

For the last project in my submission I would like to show my Viking.
I had made it for games and rendered in Unreal engine. I wanted to challenge and prove to myself that I could create a concept from start to finish no matter how difficult or confusing it was. This started from a concept by melifire, and as he developed I tried to convey certain details of his past and motivation. What it means for him to take the journey he is in vs what he would like to be doing. I wanted to create an npc type character that would fit in the world of God of War which led to my reference board be filled with this kind of style. The idea was that he would go through Midgard trying to find the source as to why the land was changing (Which was kickstarted by Kratos and Atreus going on their adventure in Gow 2018)

One of the challenges I had was creating the hair, since it was meant for games I had to learn to workflow for hair cards. Luckily I had done a personal project long ago where I attempted this. It didn't go so great so this was my redemption. It went pretty well, and looking at it again after a few months, I can definitely make them even better.

A big challenge was also polycount, It was much higher and I couldn't lower it much until our mentor Damon Woods showed us a few techniques used in different games to do this. They were quick fixes but, it saved more than 30k polygons. Overtime, I will try to optimize this character as I plan to add it into a game in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my submission for the Rookies I hope you enjoyed this summary of everything I did so far. If you would like to follow what I create or would like to chat you can contact me on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/jdelrio

Thank you for the support and I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Best, Julio