Christian Piña - 3D Character and Lighting Artist 2024

Avatar Creature

The first big project I did was a creature for VFX. In this case, since I am a big fan of the world of Avatar, I opted for this creature that could perfectly coexist in its world. The chosen concept belongs to Alexander "Minze" Thümler. 

Study

One of the most important parts when starting to model something is to do a meticulous study of the entire concept, in this case I looked for quite a few references on what the anatomy of the creature could be like, in the end I deduced that the most similar was the horse so I focused on that one. 

In addition, I also looked for other references for how the orange membranes that we found in the concept could look so that they would be well integrated into the body. Finally I also added skin texture references for detailing time.

Modeling

The next step was the modeling process, this was one of my first models, and I was very excited to get a good result.

The first thing I did was make a Blockout marking a little the silhouette of the character and its proportions, this was one of the things that cost me the most since the image of the concept has a quite strange perspective, so I had to change cameras in Zbrush to get the right proportions.

Next, and once I had the proportions, I began marking the entire anatomy of the character. As this was the first time I did anatomy, I looked at many references to understand it correctly, and as I mentioned before, I focused mainly on the horse.

Once the anatomy was correct, I began to mark the primary shapes and then the secondary shapes and finally the detailing, adding all the small details of the skin, wrinkles, pores, etc.

Lowpoly and UVs

Just before starting the detail of the pores I made the lowpoly model and the UVs, to be able to project the mesh and be able to extract the displacement map from Zbrush.

As this model was for VFX, the main characteristics of the low mesh were that they had to be all quads, and of quite regular shapes, so that when creating the details they would have a fairly similar resolution throughout the body.

As for the UVs, they gave us permission to use 7 UDIMS, so I made the cuts in the non-visible parts in case in any case the cuts were seen, I also kept the same Texel Density for everything that would be the body except for elements that were separate, such as eyes or teeth.

As for the textures, I made them using Substance Painter, and I took out 4 different maps, the color, the roughness, the normal, and a mask for the emission. In addition to Zbrush displacement.

Pose and Render

Once everything was prepared on scene and seeing that all the materials worked correctly, the creature had to be posed, in this case it was done directly in Zbrush moving the vertices using masks.

As for the lighting part, three types of lighting were created, two in which the character can be appreciated more and another in which the attention is focused more on the head part. Mainly a Key light that came from the front and a Fill light were used to illuminate a little so that the other part of the body would not be so dark. On the other hand, there was also a Rim to highlight the silhouette of the creature and the finer parts of the membranes and to make the SSS noticeable. A Top light was also created to highlight the speculars.

For the other types of lighting, the same lighting was followed, modifying values, except for the one where the face stands out more, where the Top and Key take on more importance.

Human Bust

This project started last year and since I finished it I wanted to add hair to it. This project consisted of modeling the bust of a man where it was made, all the modeling, UVs, retopology and texturing.

As I was interested in learning how to create hair for VFX, I focused on researching how to use XGen correctly and achieve the most realistic result possible.

Guide Creation

The first thing I did was duplicate the main mesh and create the Scalps, which will be where the hair will grow from. In this way, the masks to create the hair will be simpler since they will not cover as much surface area.

Once the scalps were created, I began to create guides that will be what the hairs follow. For this hair, use 6 different descriptions to have the different types of hair: main hair, beard, eyebrows, upper eyelashes, lower eyelashes and finally the peach fuzz, in this last case the guides were created in a different way where many are created on the surface and these settle, marking the direction that the hairs will follow.

For the peach fuzz, I followed these references that mark the directions of the hairs on the face, this way the hairs followed the correct direction.

Wolverine

This is the second project I have done, and it is one of the ones I have liked to do the most, I have always been a big fan of XMen and Wolverine has been one of my favorite characters. When I saw the original concept that belongs to  Daniel Araya I fell in love with it and it is the one I chose to model, since I was going to be able to play both organic modeling and a bit of Hardsurface and continue learning with XGen.

Study

For this model, the most important thing was to have good anatomy since its strong muscles are the first thing that catches your attention about the character. To do this, I looked for references from different movies or other 3D models that had such exaggerated anatomy.

Modeling

The modeling process began by analyzing the reference and marking the different parts with basic shapes. Once identified in Maya, a base mesh was created with which to later begin modeling.

This base mesh was used to later create all the clothing and shoes through polygonal modeling.

Furthermore, the modeling of this model was different since no subdivisions were used but rather it was modeled through dynamic subdivision, and I was jumping between Maya and Zbrush to add support loops where necessary to highlight the different shapes, once the model was already modeled, the wrinkles on the clothes were added using geometry.

UVs and Lowpoly

As previously mentioned, this model was made through dynamic subdivision, so as I was modeling I added loops in the shapes that I wanted to highlight, just like for clothes, the wrinkles were created by adding geometry and creating the shape from the vertices.

It also had to be taken into account that this model was designed for a cartoon movie, so having to be subdivided it was necessary to ensure that the geometry had everything in quads and to facilitate the rigging of the character the loops of the clothing had to follow the vertices of the body, so that when the clothing was rigged it would not cross the body and deform correctly.

As for the UVs, it was allowed to use 4 UDIMS, so I used three for the body and clothing and one for the eyes, always maintaining a Texel Density appropriate for the size of the pieces.

For the topic of textures, in this case I did not use displacement since the cartoon models do not need it. Here you can see the base color and the roughness, which are the main maps along with the normal map that helps give texture to the clothing items.

Hair

For the hair as well as the bust, the first thing I did was duplicate the geometry and create the scalps for the different parts of the body. As you can see in the image below, the body has been divided into different geometries that will allow you to create the descriptions more easily.

For the guides, different descriptions were created, in this case they were created for: The hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, sideburns, the chest, the arms, and lastly, as in the bust, for the peach fuzz. To create the hair in a better way, different density masks were used that were created in Substance Painter. Also for the hair, a region mask was created to separate the two upper parts and to create the root of the hair in the central part.

Pose and Render

To pose Wolverine, in this case I made a quick rig to be able to position him in a more comfortable and faster way since achieving the desired pose in Zbrush was going to deform the mesh too much and would have consumed much more time.

One of the important things when posing it was that first it had to be in pose A, to be able to warp the scalps to the regulated mesh so that when posing it the hair would move and not stay in pose A, and also, if you wanted to make any changes, it was as easy as going to frame 0, which was in pose A, and modifying the hair.

For the lighting, I decided to try to simulate as much as possible the lighting that the original concept had, having a fairly strong Rim and with orange tones, having a gradient that goes from a whiter tone to a more orange tone and as can be seen in the concept also in the subsurface that is marked in the ear area. On the front there is only one Fill that helps the character not look dark and has a good readability.

Atreus

This was the last project I did in the master's degree, and it was one focused on video games. I have always really liked the theme of Greek and Nordic mythology, so one of the video games that meets this theme is God of War. Looking for concepts that I liked, and that not many people had made, I came across this one that belongs to Rodrigo Idalino, and that is Atreus, but he is no longer a child, since he has grown up.

So without thinking about it I chose it even knowing that I had little time to do it and that the concept had many objects to do.

Study

For this character, being quite complex and having many objects, I decided to start by separating the different pieces by color, this way I could differentiate where each object went and I could have everything much more organized. In this way, I looked for references for each of the objects.

Modeling

For the modeling process I began by making a blocking of all the pieces that were going to be needed. This first blockout also served to adjust the proportions of the entire body and adapt it to match those of the original concept. Most of the pieces were made using Zbrush, although the ones that were Hardsurface were a mix between Maya and Zbrush. For some of the garments and to speed up the blockout process, they were made using Marvelous, such as the boots, t-shirt and vest.

The next process I did once I had all the pieces was to start modeling them in depth including the props, this process was carried out completely in Zbrush. At this point everything had to have a final finish but without the details.

Finally, all the detail was added to the different garments and skin, to later have better maps with which to work on the texturing.

UVs and Lowpoly

The retopology process for video games is one of the most important, since video games do not support so many polygons, so a better optimized mesh with a smaller number of polygons will work much better, for this reason you have to pay close attention and try Reduce everything to the maximum without losing your silhouette. In this case, being for video games, it may contain Tris to better optimize the topology.

As a limit we had to optimize it to have an amount less than 100,000 tris. The complete model without counting the hair contains an amount of 50,591 tris, and the hair adds another 20,492 tris. So the complete model has a quantity of 71,083 tris. This topology also has to have a good topology both on the face and at the deformation points, so that once it is rigged it deforms correctly.

Another important point is the UVs, in this case we had to optimize it to a maximum of 3 sets of textures, maximizing the space to have a better resolution in the most important parts of the model and not leave parts of the sets with spaces empty.

The texturing process was done in Substance Painter and the attempt was made to achieve a realistic result that fit within God Of War.

Hair

The hair process was one of the ones that I had to pay the most attention to, since I had never done hair through Hairdcards, the first thing I did was analyze what types of hair I was going to need and investigate how to create them.

I came to the conclusion that eyebrows, eyelashes and short hair were not going to need volume but that with textures it could already work correctly so I created some scalps. For this type of hair what I did was create on the original geometry through XGen the hair as if it were a character for VFX and then it was converted to geometry to be able to do a bake that I performed in Marmoset and with which I would obtain the opacity mask, normal map, and occlusion map.

For the process of the crest and the beard it was different, first I created a square that in order to distribute the different strands, once I already knew what type of hair strands I was going to need for the two types of hairstyle I created them using XGen. To achieve the textures as was done with the caps, they were projected in Marmoset and the different maps were obtained.

When converting them to geometry, some UVs were added to both the caps and the strands that would be useful to be able to extract two types of maps through marmoset using two textures, the first would be an ID one to extract the different hairs and another of a ramp that will help us create a gradient map for the hair to make the roots darker.

Once we had the opacity map, the different cards and their UVs were adjusted, and they were duplicated to create different strands with volume. Later they went one by one creating the hair forming different layers.

For the textures, as mentioned above, the different maps extracted from the bake were used and with the occlusion, Id, and ramp maps, the color texture was created in a gray scale so that using the engine, the hair color can be modified. 

Pose and Render

The pose was made by creating masks and moving the polygons in Zbrush. As for the render, it was done in a realtime engine such as Marmoset where a basic setup of three lights was created, Key, Rim and Fill with some tonality, to highlight the character.

Lighting

This year, I also did a lot of lighting shots. I had never done lighting scenes or characters before and the master helped me a lot in improving and learning, as well as learning some composition with Nuke.

At the beginning we started with simple black and white characters illuminating them and then different scenes and environments were created. I am very proud of all the shots achieved and doing all these lightings has helped me see that I really like lighting.

Here I leave you the final Demo Reel that I made and a last shot that I illuminated and made the composition for my great friend Pol de la Torre where if you go through his entry you will be able to see a before and after of the animations that he has made. I will also show you a small breakdown of this last plane.