Isabel Arauz - Character Reel 2024

Princess Amira

Based on the concept Lost Land-Princess Amira by 野格.

Face Blocking

For the face, I began with a basic blocking using a sphere as a foundation. This is the model blockout with basic proportions before refining further. I used Victoria Pedretti as a reference, although I wasn't aiming for an exact likeness. I sculpted freely in ZBrush, adjusting volumes while referring to my reference on another monitor. Since I wasn't looking for a precise match with the reference, I relied solely on my eyes and perception, without using alignment tools like ZBrush Spotlight.

Body Sculpting and Retopology

For the body, I used ZBrush for sculpting. I aimed for heroic proportions since this character is quite tall. Afterwards, I used ZWrap and the Metahuman base mesh for clean topology, allowing me to continue the sculpting process. 

Clothing Blocking

I created some basic patterns with the help of Marvelous Designer for the inner clothing. Then, I did several tests using the wind tool to simulate the clothing. I had to place some spheres from Maya to guide the clothing to the desired position. I draped the fabric over the spheres and then added the wind simulation to achieve the same silhouette seen in the concept. Afterwards, I did the retopology in Maya, and with clean meshes, I began refining the wrinkles.

Boot Modeling

For the boots, I used ZBrush to sculpt the initial shape. Then, I transferred it to Maya and used the Quad Draw tool to create clean topology and extruded the thickness. Next, in Marvelous Designer, I created a simple fabric pattern and projected it onto the Maya geometry to generate some realistic wrinkles on the boots.

Bird Rendering

I used a simple bird base mesh and applied a V-Ray mix shader to create the ghostly effect. Inside, I used a volume shader connected to a 3D marble texture on both opacity and emission. For the exterior material, I used the V-Ray Falloff node in emission to achieve the silhouette's glow.

In the Maya raw render, you can observe the result. Later, in Premiere, I incorporated smoke and particle overlays to create the sense of movement. I also used the "Track Matte Key" effect to erase parts of the Maya render based on a smoke overlay.

Raw Render from Maya

Final Bird Overlay

Final Renders

Dragon Princess

Based on the concept Dragon Princess by Sora Kim.

For this project, I sculpted the body and face in ZBrush and followed the same retopology process as in the previous project. All the hard surface pieces were made in Maya, taking advantage of the crease tool to avoid committing to any geometry too early; I only applied the bevels once all the geometries were visually appealing and matched the reference.

Hair Process

For the hair, I also created clean geometry in Maya, making it easy to use the Polygon Edges to Curve tool to convert them into guides later, resulting in a cleaner workflow in XGen. For the hair shader, I connected a ramp to the diffuse as well as the emission to achieve the bright blue tips. This was an early test.

Final Images

Jester Falco

This project was entirely sculpted in ZBrush. I wanted to experiment with hand-painted textures, and it was a great way to do so. The textures were created entirely in Substance Painter using the color picker to blend the colors.

For the background of the final render, I applied a painting filter to a photo of Venice. Regarding the character render, I used only the diffuse channel and then rendered it again with a gray shader that only contained the lighting information. Afterwards, I did some compositing in Photoshop.

Final Image

Based on the concept Jester Falco by Alexander Skripnikov.

Thank you so much for reading this far!

A huge thank you as well to my mentors, Alex Sizov and Raffael Frank, as well as the entire Think Tank community :)