Mikhail Pak 2024

Young Knight

Based on the concept by the incredible Toraji.

A couple of shots without helmet's groom

Look dev was done in neutral lighting scene

Topology showcase

                                      Breakdown

Face

I wanted my character to look realistic and for that just the concept reference is not enough. So I started looking for celebrities that look similar to the girl on my concept. Kristine Froseth had a lot of similar face features, I decided to use her as  my main reference for the face.

I sculpted a basic likeness of her using Zbrush Spotlight,  just aligning my sculpt to the multiple references and matching it.  When I had a basic Likeness I adjusted my sculpt to look more like my concept. I will still keep impoving  the sculpt, but for now I needed a solid base for the wrapping process.

Next in Zbrush I made a block out of the body and props. I kept working on it until all the proportions were on point. Below is an image of the early stage of the blockout.

When I was happy with the block out I started polishing all the props one by one.

To make the Chest Armor

I used quad draw in Maya on top of my block out mesh to get the basic proportions and then Just finished modeling it from the retopod mesh. In Zbrush I subdivided it and painted the mask for all the ornaments by hand. I know this is not the most efficient way to do it , but I wanted the ornaments to look as good as possible. After I finished painting them I used inflate in the deformation.

For the repetitive ornaments  I created a custom roll brush inside Zbrush. To do it I sculpted the ornament I needed on the plane and captured the alpha with MRGBZGrabber

As for the helmet. I modeled the base in maya. Using quad draw and aligning the helmet to my concept I modeled the ornaments that I polished after.

Ornaments like flower were done by firstly modeling petals and creating Zbrush insert mesh brushes. With them I built a flower on the plane that I attached to the helmet later.

To crate the tileable pattern I used ZBrush Surface 

Before the texturing process I created a neutral scene with the Macbeth chart to adjust the lighting to the neutral values

Below is my final character in that scene

My texturing process is pretty straight forward I looked for the references from real life and tried to copy them as close as I could. I always go back and fourth between rendering and texturing and try to improve it.

For the face  I wrapped the Vface textures to my sculpt.

For this project I tried to make the shading process more procedural. So in the end I only had 2 maps: Albedo and Displacement.

I controlled the roughness with the Vface set up that converts Displacement to Roughness. This way I had control of how glossy the skin is in the  multiple  areas of the face like cheeks, nose, forehead etc, same applies to the intensity of Displacement.

Here is my eyeball shader.

For the velvet sesh I used Aillayer shader mixing 2 velvet materials ( light and dark)  that I created using sheen and painting the mask in Substance for the mix. 

As for the satin I created the satin shader using anisotropy and  mixed it with the dirt material using Ailayer shader. I also painted the mask for the mix in Substance Painter.  

Xgen guides

During the project I tried multiple lighting and background set ups before I found the final one

Here are a couple of my tests

Rick

Based on the concept by the Amazing Deepfry.

Wireframe showcase

Luna

Thank you!