Dedicate your Hearts

Gina Stein - Game Development Entry - 2024

Hello! I'm Gina and I am currently a student at Pixlvisn Academy, focusing my skills on stylized character creation. I started out my education there with only basic skills in 3d art and after a year of studying I am proud to share my latest project. 

This project was created during my education at Pixlvisn for our Midterm400 in May 2024. The assignment was to create a highly detailed asset in one week, where we had the freedom to choose our own theme. During this time I focused on creating the most polished version of my work and to perfect every detail.

As I have been a fan of the series "Attack on Titan" for a long time, I wanted to create a piece based on it. There have been a lot of scenes that would've been fun to recreate in 3d, but this scene in particular has always stood out to me. Capturing the emotions of dread, sadness and numbness was a new venture for me where I learned a lot about subtle facial expressions and how to adapt visuals from a different style into my own. As my goal was to achieve a semi realistic style, I gathered a lot of different references and used them to create a mix that I was ultimately satisfied with. 

I used ZBrush to sculpt all the soft surface parts of the model. I started with a rough block out with spheres to get the proportions right. My first focus was the face, wanting to achieve a soft look to create a contrast of his soft features to the overall vibe of the piece.  I then added the exposed muscle detail in the face, keeping the transition area of the skin in mind. After I had finished the face I worked on the body, which I kept as a separate piece, to then use it as a base to extract the shirt from. I then added the folds by hand, keeping a close eye on how the would form in real life. The final part I worked on before posing was the hair. I used a curve brush to add each individual strand, laying them down and adding detailed strokes to all of them. When that was completed, I posed the body and added a final sphere which I used as a base for the muscle he is emerging out of.  

The armor, gas tank, wire and small metal parts I modeled in Maya, using official art as a reference. I then imported my sculpt into Maya to place all those parts and to retopoligize it, using the quad draw tool to create a low poly version. 

The texturing for this asset was done in Substance Painter for the most part, except the base color of the eyes which I did in procreate. I baked all the details of my sculpt onto my low poly model at first, using utility maps such as ambient occlusion as the starting point for my base colors. When the rough base color for all the different materials was completed, using the aforementioned utility maps, I added some noise textures for subtle color variation. I took a long time on the skin, using different layers and blend modes to achieve a semi realistic base before I added hand painted details all over. I used the same workflow for the rest of the asset, trying to achieve a cohesive look. Something important I'd like to mention is that even though I went for semi realism, my reference for the texturing were various collectible statues and not actual humans. 

From the very beginning my plan was to render my final shots in UE5, not only to save on rendering time but also because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. Setting up the lighting was the biggest challenge for me this time around, as I had to experiment a lot to get a result I was satisfied with that also reflected the mood I was going for. getting into the nitty gritty of all the technical aspects of UE5 was a rewarding learning opportunity for me and helped me to get a deeper understanding of the software overall.