Weng Io Chan 2024

Miss Mermaid

This is my advanced term final project at Think Tank Training Center. I spent around 5 months creating this project.

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Modeling: Maya, Zbrush

Texturing: Mari, Wrap

Rendering: Vray

Concept and References

The concept of this project was created by Gremuir (https://twitter.com/gremuir/status/1132362470599811072).

Modeling and Sculpting

I started by creating her in realistic human proportions, with the tail roughly twice the length of her body. After posing, I aligned her with the concept in Maya for better comparison. I noticed she was a little hunched over and her head was not in the right position. After the adjustment, her head and eyes have been significantly enlarged to match the comic style of the concept.

Additionally, I make a separate model for the head for more subdivisions. I used texture XYZ and surface noise to create the skin details on the face, then blended it with the body through another displacement map I created in Mari. Details on the fins are manually sculpted with the dam standard brush.

Grooming

I used Xgen and Maya paint tool to create and color her hair, eyelashes, and peachfuzz. Compared to humans, she has much less hair and thicker eyelashes.

Texturing

Considering the differences in sub-scattering intensity and color between her upper body, lips, horns, tail, glow patterns, and makeup, I simply painted a few masks in Mari and further tested them in Maya.

Look-Dev

I created different shaders for each body part and fine-tuned their texture maps individually. Except for the luminous pattern, which uses normal Vray material, the others are all Vray Al shaders. The body has a blue tint scattering, while the tail has a greenish-pink tint, and the horns have a greenish-blue tint.

Lighting

Light up the scene

Replicating the lighting of the concept is quite challenging to me. In the concept, the light shining on her left and right faces seems to be the same. But when I use a headlight or adjust the intensity to be the same on both sides, it makes her face look goofy. I first used light select to isolate each light and tried compositing in Photoshop to figure out the problem, then used light mix to replicate the result in Maya. Additionally, I tinted some of the lights to enrich her skin tone even more.

Mesh Light

To strengthen her skin tone and accentuate her pattern, I used her horns, body, and irises to create mesh lights. Lighting intensity is subtle to preserve shadows.

Light

This is my intermediate term final project at Think Tank Training Center. I spent around 6 weeks creating this project.

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Modeling: Maya, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer

Texturing: Mari, ZWrap

Rendering: Vray

Concept and References

Since I officially only had 4 weeks to create this project, I chose a vague concept so that I wouldn't have to match everything one by one. The concept of this project was created by yixishangyong.

Modeling and Sculpting

I basically interpreted the gold part of the concept as scales and armor, and the white part as bones, flesh and fabric. To add variety, I added some small white gems to the armor. Surface details including skin, scales, and feathers were fully generated in Mari and then combined in Maya to reduce the subdivision levels.

Clothing

The pants were fully created in Marvelous Designer. I first determined the overall shape and cut it, then created the gold sections as inseam for hints. I cut them at last after adding the diamond details for embellishment. To make the pattern match better, I kept all pairs of pieces the same length and fine-tuned them manually. Since the pants are tight, I have to use a model with a higher resolution to generate a smoother model.

Texturing and Look-Dev

Most objects are textured with metallic and iridescent materials. The feathers are slightly more complex, textured by projecting images of real bird feathers, then leveled into different colors and materials, and overlaid with iridescent reflections. To speed up the texturing process, I separated the feathers into different groups based on their size and overlapped their UVs.

Thanks for reading : )