Thrall from the "Warcraft" Franchise: Character Bust with Pedestal

Introduction

The "Warcraft" franchise is very dear to me. I remember lots of summer nights spent playing Warcraft III on my grandparents old PC. When our teachers tasked us with creating a character bust as a school project, Thrall, one of the most popular protagonists from the series, seemed like a good fit to test my skills.

Step One: Gathering Reference Images

First things first: let's get some reference images! After browsing the web for a bit, two artworks captured my interest and I decided to use them as my main source of inspiration, alongside official character models from Blizzard Entertainment.

Step Two: ZBrush Sculpting - Body

Everyone in our class started following the same workflow, using a basic sphere mesh to sculpt the base for future facial features. From there we extracted the neck first and then the shoulders. An important technique we were taught was to use human muscles as a reference to create a realistic shapes all over the body. The ClayBuildup brush was perfect for the job and it quickly became my favourite tool. After that, we extracted the chest and the arms.

Step Three: ZBrush Modeling - Hair And Accessories

Thrall has been given a few outfits throughout the years, but I decided to go with the wolf fur since I wanted to sculpt most of the project on ZBrush. I made a duplicate of the character's head, put it underneath the "real" head, then sculpted hair and beard from there. This part was so much fun and the ClayBuildup, combined with the Rake brush, did the trick.

After that, it was time for some accessories. I sculpted the belt starting from some primitive shapes, then placed them under the character.

Step Four: ZBrush Modeling - Wolf Fur

Almost time to leave ZBrush behind! The last thing I sculpted was the wolf fur on Thrall's shoulders and around the belt. I wasn't really sure how to do it, so I tried starting from a sphere and played around with the Move brush. After nailing the shape, I used the ChiselCreature brush to create some stylized fur strands and the claws.

Step Five: Body Retopology On Maya

For the next part, I exported the body as an FBX file to start the retopology process in Maya. Boring, but necessary. Then, I decimated the other subtools in ZBrush and used them to build the low poly version of Thrall's model. I was about ready to get on Substance 3D Painter and bake!

Step Six: Texturing In Substance 3D Painter

Texturing was fun. I played around with layers, masks, filters, all the good stuff. You'll find the full process below.

Step Seven: Rendering In Maya

And for my final trick... rendering! First of all, I had to export these fresh textures from Substance to Maya. After that, I went into Hypershade and connected all the required nodes. We were given a set with lights and a backdrop, so all I had to do in the end was to adjust the camera and render.

Conclusion

This project was challenging. As I said before, I had literally zero experience in the field before enrolling in BigRock. This is my third month in this school, and although I still have a long road ahead of me, I feel like I made some good progress. I had lots of fun during the few weeks we worked on our character projects, and I can't wait to get better and better with time and practice. I'd like to thank all of my classmates for cheering me on every step of the way and the staff at BigRock for the help and patience!