Jed Stuart - Character Artist

Introduction

My name is Jed and I am a graduate Character Artist. The two projects I am showing today for The Rookies 2024 have been my milestones in artistic quality and technical advances in my workflow.

Sol, The Healer

My ArtStation Link:

A game ready character using PBR and falling within the art style of realism. This was an incredibly challenging character considering all of the accessories and props, layers of clothing, shaders, anatomy considerations and more. This was the first serious character I was a able to complete after my studies at university, and I gained a lot of feedback and resources shared by many people from The Club Discord, who helped me grow as an artist considerably.

This 3D character came from a concept made by the artist Ana Fedina (Concept Artist's Link)

Beauty Renders

High Poly Sculpt Renders

Wireframes

Technical Breakdowns

Breakdown of the shader by Alejandro Bielsa Martin at:
https://bielsa.artstation.com/blog/199P/progress-on-aurora-fanart-shader-based-transitional-eye-meshes

My Reference Board

Fellrunner - Beyond Skyrim: Elsweyr

My ArtStation Link:

This project is my very latest completed work. After becoming more confident in my abilites, and yearning to work with others, I found a large group of people in The Arcane University Discord, which then led me to make an application to the volunteer modding team, Beyond Skyrim: Elsweyr. They were in need of all kinds of artists; especially for creatures and character clothing.

For my first claim, I chose to create a custom creature called The Fellrunner, build from the 2D Concept Art by Marissa Schmidt (Concept Artist's Link)

The team of volunteers at Beyond Skyrim are separated into the different 'provinces' of Tamriel, each with Art Directors and leads for each department such as 3D, 2D, Audio, Implementation, Writing and more. It was an honour to work with these guys and experience the full pipeline of my chosen craft. Each step of the process from sculpt, to model, texturing, groom and animation were adapted to all feedback given. This differs from portfolio work as there were so many more variables such as technical constraints, various ideas and matching artstyles. This creature's assets since has been handed over to the team to implement into Creation Kit.

Beauty Renders

High Poly Sculpt Renders

Technical Breakdowns

Creating game assets for an already set game, imposed many limits, such as a limited tri-count that ranged between 1.5 - 2 times the tri count and texture resolution of an equivalent asset. It was tricky to find the balance between high quality art and something that fell into that range, but I managed to create a fully groomed creature and was able to limit the texture calls by allowing the normals and specularity maps to be shared between the body and feathers, only allowing diffuse textures to be unique. This passed feedback stages and the tri-count fell within 2X the amount Skyrim's bear has - a creature of equivalent size.

While this Fellrunner is presented to you in PBR, the final assets required a conversion to the specularity format of rendering, which I was able to achieve by converting roughness into gloss, multiplying AO and a bit of Cavity to the gloss, and a few manual tweaks, such as making the eyes fully white for the most specular shine.

Reference Board

The Fellrunner - A Rigging Breakdown

I want to create a dedicated section to highlight my rigging process. For character artists, a posed model is really essential to finish off a character, I think. It can really help to match the pose of a concept for final renders, and at least is a good time to check your topology as well. Posing can be done simply in ZBrush or your 3D program of choice by masking or soft selection, and manual posing. You can also create a rig yourself, to create animations. For this project, I decided to fill a skill gap in the team by learning animation to create a full suite of animations the team would need, along with a custom skeleton rig.

Beyond Skyrim and Custom Creatures:

A brief history: Skyrim mods, for a while, could only use preset skeletons of creatures and humanoids to just replace models, leading to new creatures, but constrained to the proportions of a set in-game skeleton with creature behaviours. After a few modders programmed new conversion software, it has made the implementer's job easier to insert custom creature skeletons and dictate new behaviours for them, which in turn allows artists to create creatures that differ from other creature's proportions and allows for new skeleton rigs and animations to be created.

However, much of the documentation provided by The Arcane University and it's Discord (a learning hub for Skyrim modding in collaboration with TES: Renewal projects and the Beyond Skyrim projects), mostly have Blender workflows in mind and older 3dsMax versions. As a Maya user, it was up to me to create a new rigging workflow that was compatible with NifSkope and Skyrim's engine.

Initial Rig Creation:

I used Autodesk Maya with the addons; AdvancedSkeleton6 and ngSkinTools. Advanced Skeleton allows you to create a rig from a preset, or from scratch, with free and easy dictation of what parts have IK, driving systems, and modifying attributes. ngSkinTools allows an artist to weight paint in layers with an easier interface to make the process more simple, as well as exporting of weight paint into .json files - which makes for a handy backup when you cannot simply transfer weights from one model to another natively in Maya.

Rigging Feathers (And Groom in General)

I created a 'dummy' mesh for the feathers to weight paint first - then transferred this dummy mesh's weights to the individual feather mesh. This makes the process far more easier. I also transferred the smooth shaded vertex normals from the dummy to the feathers, so the vertex normals blend together and reduce the edges of groom cards being so visible. You can (and should) do this for hair, as well!

You can also use this method to first rig a lower resolution model of your character, if it has decently high topology and complex clothing parts. It is much easier to deal with few vertices when rigging and weight painting, and then transfer those weights to your final model.

Custom Rigging Workflow for Beyond Skyrim Maya Users

Below, you can find a graphic I made for the team to make Maya rigs compatible for Beyond Skyrim projects.

In Summary; essentially the issue was - because of differing world-space directions, the rigged mesh would face the wrong way in NifSkope, which meant it wouldn't work in Creation Kit for Skyrim. I discovered that what I had to do was take the unrigged mesh and make it face the world-space directions in NifSkope before skinning the mesh to the rig. After that, I could use the overall rig controller or an 'empty' (or dummy) to rotate the model and rig the right way for animation.

An Issue and Interesting Discovery from This Workflow

I discovered that when importing this version of the rigged mesh to Unreal Engine 5, the normals of the rigged model's mesh were wrong. I tried flipping the Y channel of the normals to no effect, until I tried re-rigging the model - except with the model facing the right way in Maya, not being rotated up after the fact. This solved the issue and led me to discover that somehow, world-space normals or directions were somehow baked into a rig and can effect the shading.

Specularity

And to finally show - the creatures in NifSkope, but using specularity for rendering, as well a couple of props made for the team (after all, the Dragonborn will need a good meal after hunting and running around for these creatures!)