3D Character Modelling I The Young Soul's Mom

Hi, I’m Cantabille! This is my 3D Character Modelling project for my final year at The One Academy, titled "Relive." The short movie will be released soon!

My project tells the story of a young soul thrust into Meng Po's teahouse, the Chinese deity of forgetfulness. Frightened by the horrors within, he attempts to escape his inevitable fate.

I was responsible for creating the young soul's mother character. This time, instead of using Arnold Render, I utilized a shader from Artineering, with a help of a friend, I was able to tweak extensively. The style for this scene is watercolor, aiming for a 2D painted look. We made sure to include a thick outline and a watercolor bleeding effect for the mother character. I put all of my references in PureRef.

The mother is portrayed as a poor, gentle, and kind-hearted woman who deeply loves her son. I aimed to capture the essence of her personality in my work.

Here, you can see my sculpting progress. The top-left image didn’t match our vision, so I made numerous adjustments. I enjoyed this process as it allowed me to learn more about stylized characters.

During the retopology phase, I optimized the topology to ease the animators' and riggers' work.

 For the hair, I experimented with making the strands visible because we wouldn't be using normal or displacement maps, relying solely on the albedo map. The style we were aiming for only required the albedo map.

To simplify, I sculpted the hair strands during the blocking stage, allowing control over thickness and direction, I then baked the normal map for texturing in Substance Painter. This way, texturing the hair in Substance Painter helped me understand how to add shadows and highlights, despite being tedious. (I enjoyed it very much actually!).

I struggled with texturing the mother due to her distinct appearance compared to other characters. I used a hard strokes technique to achieve the watercolor look we desired after applying the shader.

For the clothes, I did some blocking in Marvelous Designer, then refined it in Zbrush, I used Quad Draw to retopo the clothes.

Here is the test image.

and this is the final result! (This is one of The Memory Scenes).  I’m happy with the outcome, especially considering I completed the mother character in less than two months. Despite the time constraint, I enjoyed seeing my skills improve daily. Thank you for reading, and I hope you like it