Demoness - Personal Project

Hi! My name is Patricia and I'm on a journey to become a 3d character artist for animation. While my most recent background is in customer support as a corporate trainer, since the end of last year, I've decided to, once again, redirect my efforts to 3D art. 

I'd like to share here my most recent personal project, which was created after a 3-year break from anything related to character work. I hope you enjoy it!

Demoness - Welcome to Hell

I found the art for this character while browsing through Pinterest, and as soon as I saw it, all I could think about was how I could go about it to recreate her as a 3D Character. So I saved the image and started taking a deeper look at the details of the image.

While I was unable to confirm who the author was, given that the image was an illustration and not a character sheet, some parts of its design would be left to my criteria (particularly the pants and the shoes). Nevertheless, I had already in mind what details I wanted to try to convey with the end result.

Process Breakdown

References

To avoid too much back and forth, I  closely analyzed the image beforehand to figure out all the elements that I would need to do for the character. At the same time, I also started to gather some references for the non-seen elements, so I could have a better scope of my to-do list.

Despite my initial planning, the list did have to go through some alterations along the way. This was to account for some unforeseen circumstances (ex: PC malfunction), while also ensuring the character could still be completed in time.

Modeling & Sculpting - High Poly

As soon as I was done looking at the illustration, I began modeling & sculpting the character using ZBrush and Maya. The steps were as follows:

1. Started with the more organic shapes (the body and clothes) in Zbrush.

2. With the initial structure, I transferred the character to Maya to create the hard surfaces (accessories & shoes)

3. With those elements completed, I moved the accessories and shoes to Zbrush, so I could refine them for the high poly mesh.

Low Poly Mesh & UVs

These two steps were completed solely in Maya. During this process, I wanted to guarantee that the final product would still abide by animation standards and also not completely force my current PC into retirement. From my understanding, this would mean that the polycount limit could be less restrictive than if it was for a model to be used for games, and the UVs could be separated into UDIM sets for texturing.

So in the end, I split the UVs in a way that would make it easier to paint and texture them, and created separate tiles based on the different body parts and props. This resulted in UDIMS for the body, additional elements like the horns, tail, and hair, the different sets of clothes as well as the accessories (shoes, necklaces, and the earring).

Before moving on to the texturing stage, I decided to move the low poly back into Zbrush and try out a couple of poses for the character, using the Transpose plugin. This helped me figure out if what I currently had, would work well or not with the different poses.

Texturing and Renders

At this stage, I used Substance Painter for the textures, which were then set up as shaders in Maya, for Arnold to create the final renders.

The 2D layouts themselves, the ones you see here, were compiled and created using Photoshop.

Final Thoughts

Although it had been a while since I had done a complete 3D character ( 3 years ago, since I finished the course), the joy of creating such a piece was still very much present in my heart.

Going back into this, I was able to re-learn most of what I was taught during my studies, but I also learned a lot of new things. Ones which, I hope I can apply in any future project I delve into next time.

The process might not have been perfect, however, it was a lot of fun to reconnect with the community and go back to doing something more creative.

Thank you so much for checking this out, and I hope to see you all again with my next project ;)