Lea Reichhart - Dead Mans' Chest and a Cyberpunk Girl

Hello everyone! My name is Lea, I'm a 3D and VFX student at PIXL VISN media arts academy in Germany. I'm now about 13 months into my 3D education and in the following 5 months I'm going to work on my demo reel. The projects I will present to you are my mid- or endterm projects I created within my education. Without further do, let's jump into the projects!

Project 01 - Dead Mans' Chest

The first project I would like to present to you is my Endterm 300, which I created after 8 months of my 3D education. I had one week to finish the whole project including modeling, texturing, shading, lookdev, rendering and compositing. Besides that I had to match a given theme for this endterm which was ”superheroes vs supervillains”, so I decided to model Davy Jones' chest and heart from Pirates of the Caribbean. 

Ideas and references

Since I had a given theme for this project, I struggled quite a lot with finding something I can create that matches this theme. Usually I always like to create characters or creatures in 3D but this time I decided to go for assets only. I really love the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and liked the idea of modeling and texturing Davy Jones' chest. This was the perfect solution for me since I was able to create a hard surface model (the chest) and an organic model (the heart) and improve my skills in both workflows.

A very important aspect before even starting the project was to gather references from the original movie (Dead Man’s Chest). I did not go for a replica of the assets in the movie but give them my own touch since I wanted to keep some creativity. Nevertheless the references were very important, especially for the heart-like lock and Davy Jones’ heart itself.

Also I gathered references of the environment and lighting in the movie. Especially the lighting I really liked since in a lot of scenes in the movie there is a contrast between cold moonlight and warm light which I also recreated in my presentation scene.

Chest

Modelling

For the chest I started in Maya. First I made a blockout of the main shapes and after that I added more details and started to refine all of the shapes. 

After the hard surface modeling was done I made the UVs for the chest in Maya and took the model over to zBrush for sculpting the details which I then baked as a displacement map. For the tentacle ornaments I sculpted my own alpha so I just had to drag them on the surface.

Texturing

The texturing for the chest I started with baking my highpoly model onto my lowpoly inside of Substance Painter to get an ambient occlusion, normal and curvature map. With that I added a bunch of fill layers and masks to create the base color. For the colors I oriented myself more on a reference of the chest with a rather warm colored wood.

Having all the base colors laid out I added a lot of color variations in the wood and also in the metal to give it a more realistic look. Also I added some smart masks to make the edges more worn out. For finishing touches I adjusted the roughness map with a bit more breakup.

Heart

Modelling

The heart I completely modeled in zBrush by starting with blocking out the shapes using Polyspheres. I struggled quite a bit with observing the anatomy of a human heart but with the help of references it was a lot of fun to sculpt it. After finishing my lowpoly model I used zRemesher to lower the polycount and to have a better topology. Then I created the UVs in Maya.

After that I jumped back into zBrush to sculpt the details for the displacement map, just like I did for the chest. That involved sculpting a fleshy, muscle-like surface and all the little suction cups which are characteristic for Davy Jones, since he is half-octopus.

Texturing

Just like for the chest I textured the heart in Substance Painter by painting all the base colors manually. I used a lot of red, blue and yellow tones and blended them together by lowering the opacity of each fill layer. Like that I achieved a more realistic looking color variation.

I also added lots of small veins in the texturing stage and refined the pores and wrinkles even more using a few smart masks. Adding the ambient occlusion for some more realistic shading also helped to make it look more authentic. I also adjusted the roughness map a lot to make it look wet but at the same time to have some rougher breakup since it should look a bit rotten.

Presentation

For the presentation I loaded my lowpoly models into Maya and assigned all the maps. Then I started to build a small environment around the assets using mostly Quixel Megascans and also a lamp from the PIXL VISN fantasy house scene. I tried to recreate the jungle environment from one of the movie scenes. After that I set up the lights using the nice warm and cold lighting contrast from the movie. For the cameras I chose very slow and subtle movements to create a calm atmosphere.

Final + turntable

Project 02 - Cyberpunk Girl

The second project I would like to show you is my Production Training 400, which I made after 12 months of my 3D education. I created this project within 3 weeks, again from modeling over texturing to the presentation and rendering. 

Ideas and references

For my Production Training 400 I had to choose between multiple assets I was allowed to model, for example a car, an iguana or a stylized character. I really wanted to create a stylized character since a longer time now so this was the perfect opportunity. For this task I had to match a specific character design style - in this case the style from the Pixar movie „Lightyear“. I wanted to create my own character since I’m very interested in character design and started gathering references from the movie. I knew that I wanted to create something referring to the space rangers from the movie so I looked at a lot of space and sci-fi costume designs. In the end I decided to go for a cyberpunk look and started working on the character design.

A very important aspect before even starting the project was to gather references from the original movie „Lightyear“. Since I had to match the facial features and overall style of the characters, looking at lots of movie references was super important. Also I gathered a lot of references of stylized body models and their topology, especially also stylized faces. Since I wanted to give my character a cyberpunk vibe, I looked at a lot of character designs and combined the parts I liked into my own concept. 

Modelling

I started by creating the base body sculpt in zBrush. Therefore I looked at a lot of anatomy references and starting from scratch I slowly built up the body from spheres. After I had blocked out all the muscles and shapes, I dynameshed everything together and smoothed out all the hard edges to create an organic look. I struggled quite a lot with finding the right proportions of the face and it took me some hours to figure out how to match it with the given style. But in the end I was quite happy with the outcome.

After that I loaded my body sculpt into Maya and added the eyes. Then I started the retopology of the body with the Quad Draw Tool. After finishing the retopology, I went towards creating the clothes and armor. All the armor and clothes besides the pants I modeled in Maya by drawing the shapes on the body with the Quad Draw Tool and extruding them out. This took quite some time but I learned a lot in this process. To finish the armor up I beveled all the hard edges. The pants I made in Marvelous Designer as soon as all the other clothes were done. Here I used preset pants and tweaked them a lot so that they matched my concept. As soon as I was happy with how the pants looked, I made the retopology for them in Marvelous, since it is easier there to simply retopologize the 2D pattern. To finish the modeling in Maya up, I created the UVs for all the parts.

As soon as all the modeling work inside of Maya was done, I jumped over to zBrush to start sculpting the final details of the model which later will be the displacement map. This stage didn’t take as much time since I only added more folds on the pants and socks to make them look more realistic. I also defined the muscles and the facial shapes such as lips and nose a bit more.

Texturing

The texturing I started with baking my highpoly model onto my lowpoly inside of Substance Painter to get an ambient occlusion, normal and curvature map. I never textured so many different materials in one project before - such as metal, skin, fabric, leather etc. so the texturing stage took me quite some days. For the skin I first created a subdermal layer with red, yellow and blue hues. Then I created the epidermal layer on top where I painted with the final skin color over the subdermal layer. For the armor I used some smart masks to make the edges appear worn out so you can see the metal underneath. I also added emission to the armor that I would make glow later in Nuke. For the fabric I used a fibre normal map to create the fabric appearance and also added some damage. Same goes for the belts where I used a leather texture and added damage after establishing the colors and roughness of the material. On the pants I added some patches from „Lightyear“ as well as from „Star Wars“ and other sci-fi movies. 

Grooming

The next step was grooming the eyebrows, eyelashes and hair. Before that I put my lowpoly model back to zBrush for creating the pose. Then in Maya I started adding guides for the eyebrows and eyelashes with xGen and painted density masks for the different regions. Then I adjusted the the hair width and density and added some modifiers such as clumping and noise. This was also my first time grooming a hair style with a ponytail but it was a lot of fun. I started with the main hair on the head which ended where the hair is tied together. The ponytail itself was a new description in xGen. Also the bangs which tie the hair together and the small hair strands in front of the ears I created separately. For finishing touches I also added clumping and noise to give more breakup to the hair.

Today I would approach this step differently and would put much more time into the grooming. But due to the fact that I had only a few days left until the deadline, I made the best out of it.

Presentation

For the presentation I loaded my lowpoly models into Maya and assigned all the maps. Then I started to create the environment which I wanted to be a dirty alley with neon lights to match the cyberpunk vibe. I was so lucky that the PIXL VISN students Judith Tymosiuk, Noah Kolb and Linus Frank gave me their cyberjunk project which they created for their Pipeline 400 class. This was just the environment I was looking for so I really just had to add some small assets and lighting to create the final look. 

Conclusion

Looking back at these projects I would approach a lot of things different now. I still learned a lot from each project; especially the full character creation was very exciting with all the different aspects of it. 

I hope I could give you a good insight of my creation process and my work. I'm really excited to participate at the Rookies Awards 2025 with my demo reel! I wish all the other contestants good luck for the competition and also for their creative journey!

You can reach me here:

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/_artsy.lea_/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lea-reichhart-327651274/