Jonas Westerholm - Stylized characters, student portfolio

Greater Basilisk

For this project my goal was to make a creature with scales and try out making my own brushes in Zbrush for the scales. I also wanted to present the creature in a environment scene. I found this really cool concept by Iana Venge of a Greater Basilisk which i based this 3D model on: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8ldZ2n

I made the highpoly entirely in Zbrush, made retopo for the lowpoly and UVs in Maya and textured it in Substance painter. All the renders are made in Unreal 5. All the Environment assets and effects in the renders were also made by me.  

BPR texturing made in Substance painter

Highpoly, lowpoly, wireframe and finale result, view 1.

Highpoly, lowpoly, wireframe and finale result, view 2.

Stylized Demon

For this project my goal was to make a fully game ready character in the style of world of wacraft. So that included highpoly, lowpoly, UVs, texturing, rigging, animation and VFX. Unfortunately, though to time constraints i didn’t finish the VFX but I got to rigg the character and make a simple idle animation for it.
Otherwise, the biggest challenge on this project was making handpainted textures and only using a albedo map with unlit lightning, which is something I haven’t tried properly before. I would have liked to pushed the details on the textures even further, but it was a really fun project to work on!

The concept I used for this 3d model are by Labros Panousi: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GneoW.

I wanted the model to be as game ready as possible and showcase I could work with the whole character pipeline, so I also made a rigg and some simple animations for the character. I also explored some color variations for the character that could work in the warcraft universe (Fel, Sand and Void version).

I made the highpoly for this completely in zbrush, from blockout to finished model. I then took it into Maya for retopo for the lowpoly model and UVs. For the texturing, i did the highpoly to lowpoly bakes and base texture layers in Substance painter and then used 3D coat and photoshop for the handpainted details.

Stylized fantasy knight

Having wanted to make a set of armor for a long time now I decided to make one heavy armored human character for my portfolio. The design for this is based on a concept by Russell Dongjun Lu:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RnW4Ym

My focus on this project was to practice hard surface modeling, since my other 2 projects were almost entirely organic. But I also wanted to showcase some other aspects for character modeling with this one, like face, hair and clothing but in a smaller scope. It was a very challenging project, with so many different parts and materials, but a lot of fun and I learnt a lot from it!

I made most of the blockout of the character in maya except the face and the bear heads for the shoulders which I did completely in Zbrush. After I had a good base for the blockout i worked a lot back and forth between maya and zbrush to get all the shapes of the armor how I wanted them to be. I wanted the style of the character to lean a bit more stylized than the original concept, so I used Overwatch and Heroes of the storm as main references for all the shapes and texturing of the character. When the highpoly was done I made the retopo and UVs in maya. I used substance painter for the texturing and presented the model in Unreal Engine 5.