Ashitaka

(This scene was created for the Academy of Art University 2024 Spring Show and was awarded as the #1 Winner in the 'Organic Modeling Realistic' category)

Concept Art - Jude Smith

 I chose this fantastic concept art by Jude Smith back in 2023. At that time, I was searching for something with a lot of elements, hard surface and organic, and with various materials. -to explore and improve my skills in a wide range of modeling and texturing. This was my first full body character project.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ga31Y3 Concept Art – Jude Smith

Instructor Tan Bi warned me how challenging it would be to complete this character. Most of all, the concept art only had one front view, and it was totally fictional. I searched as many references as possible that resembled the shape and texture of the concept because I aimed to present a realistic style while following the concept.

Modeling Process

I started the modeling process from scratch—from a sphere—created a base mesh for the whole body, and draped a garment on top of it using Marvelous Designer. 

Blocking out - Zbrush

Creating Garments - Marvelous Designer

It was my first time using MD; I searched for beginner tutorials and found one making a similar shape to my character’s shirt and followed along, including pants and coat. I visited the MD booth at GDC 2023, and they had recently come up with a feature for retopologizing in MD. I retopologized the shirt with MD but couldn’t do it quickly. I searched for several tutorials and found one from OutGang https://youtu.be/o_Q-N8CoyCU?si=MfQg4nhStmcVnA93. However, I ran into some problems with the UV and opted to follow another way

Cloth Retopology - Maya

The straps, shoes, holster, glove, and hood were modeled using ZModeler. The monitor, buckles, gas mask, gun, and sword were modeled in Maya.

A Challenge – Mechanical Arm

The most challenging part was the metal arm. It had to be believable and match the reference at the same time. Looking up real life references like bionic limbs helped simplifying the shapes. After blocking the parts, the forms looked too rigid compared to the reference. Setting up a camera in Maya with image plane helped when modifying the silhouette. After that I took the mechanical arm into Zbrush and placed it in position for the T-pose and added wires with Zsphere. 

After completing the T-Pose I moved everything to Maya, categorized them in 7 different materials -skin, metal, fabric, rubber, leather, glass, textile. Named everything according to their material_color_object and grouped them together.

UV Unwrap - Maya

Onto UV unwrapping stage, I unwrapped everything in Maya,

Texturing - Substance Painter

Shading Network in Maya

Posing - Transpose (Zbrush)

Adding Hair - Xgen, Xgen Interactive

I added eyebrows and eyelashes using XGen and the coat fur using XGen and Xgen Interactive.