Game Art Institute Character Creation for Games With Adam Skutt Week 1 ââ“ 3

Dorsum TO Student INTERVIEWS

Real-Time Character in 3D

INTERVIEW WITH Gue Yang

Gue Yang took CGMA'southward Side by side Gen Character course led past Adam Skutt and talked about creating the kickoff real-time 3D character: Mari & ZBrush workflows, solving issues with export to Marvelous Designer, a few useful tutorials, and more!

Introduction

Hi, my name is Zhuyaj and I'thou originally from the Bay Surface area, California. Currently, I'one thousand a character concept creative person at Turtle Stone Studios. I went to school for Illustration and Fine arts and pursued concept fine art in the game industry in 2011. I've always wanted to brand a game myself but thought that I was a poor designer/painter so I opted for art school to sharpened that aspect offset. Although I've barely scratched the surface of the 2nd realm, I feel that there is some calorie-free of confidence in jumping into the world of 3D and finally doing what I've always dreamed of.

Commencement of the Project

As a word of warning, when I decided to take CGMA's Next-Gen Character art class taught by Adam Skutt, I had no clue what I was doing as information technology was my first ever 3D grapheme, and learning every app from scratch was a brain killer! All I knew was that I wanted to practise fan art of the archetype survival horror RPG released in 1998 by Squaresoft, Parasite Eve. However, it would have to exist re-imagined in the current next-gen realistic way.

In the game Parasite Eve, y'all play as Aya Brea, a rookie cop in the NYPD who fights off a viral mutation that spreads across NYC. While I looked for a electric current existent-life replacement for Aya, I researched current detective shows that portrayed a confident young female person detective:

Later gathering dozens of inspiration reference, I started the concept art. I made certain to accept elements that I wanted such as the bomber jacket and jeans, and detective badge and a gun holster. Among the changes in the design was the badge necklace, plus I gave her an inner hoodie:

I fabricated the concept mainly for mood and feel rather than likeness, and I concluded up making the final character a scrap older.

Starting time Steps in ZBrush & Mari

In ZBrush, I started off with a low poly base of operations mesh that would match the concept'southward proportion and trunk type.

Next, Adam recommended that we do a ZBrush quick sculpt of how our wearing apparel would look/fit on the body earlier going into Marvelous Designer:

As for the article of clothing parts, I did quite a flake of reference inquiry to find the parts that I needed. It was mainly doing the proper research on the specific piece of pattern and and then I started right away in Marvelous.

Exporting from Marvelous to ZBrush

The but consequence I had was connected with exporting from Marvelous Designer. Due to the issues I had when merging and ZRemeshing, I used a method shared past character artist Yuri Alexander. He imports dissever adjacent parts and thickens them past groups. Then he merges them all at the finish.

By week iii, I had imported the fake article of clothing from Marvelous into ZBrush. The inner parts of the hoodie which aren't seen were deleted since they were unnecessary.

Head Hunting

Because this is a 10-week course that requires learning new programs, Adam asked united states to aim merely at getting the bust done. However, I was spending about viii hours a day afterwards work on this character, and fifty-fifty then I finished simply past the 11th week!

To become the likeness I gathered tons of reference of the actress I chose, Lauren German language. I didn't want a 100% likeness, and then I decided to omit certain features like the lips, jaw etc.

I divided the head refs into frontals, three quarters, and profiles:

In Mari, I used XYZ displacement pores project. There'southward a ton of tutorials on dividing 3 primary pore displacements into RGB channels in Photoshop, and then project painting them onto the model in Mari. Afterward, you just consign 3 Mari displacements dorsum into ZBrush equally layers, that way yous can find the perfect balance in blending.

Pilus Creation

For the pilus, I followed Adam Skutt's tutorial on existent-time pilus which you tin can observe here: Realtime Pilus Tutorial. The procedure starts off with generating Xgen pilus in Maya for texture. As for the polyhairs, they consist of 4 layers of polyhairs in ZBrush. This was probably the nigh ho-hum task in terms of time. Information technology took about 4 days hand placing each poly hair in ZBrush.

A quick Photoshop concept sketch to imagine the hair management:

As I said, the most boring task was placing hairs past hand and I felt like an idiot when I found out there were plugins in Maya that could practice information technology for you lot… But I suppose there's some dearest in it when yous practise it by manus.

In terms of heaviness, I wanted the hair to look good in terminal render so I had two depression and dumbo poly cards.

Texturing

For texturing, I used Substance Painter. Painter already has a decent library of materials that I can use for everyday mundane fabrics and difficult-surface then I did not invent whatsoever fancy custom materials. I but used the premade materials and played with the variables to become what I wanted:

Basically, I used the method of making ID maps and then applying materials to each segment across all my garment parts. This jacket gif is a good example since it has several ID separations and Painter works actually well with dropping in custom materials.

In terms of getting the final render to look a certain style (for example, the jacket), make sure to have metalness turned on plus anisotropic setting like yous would for the hair. It allows yous to mess with the reflections in that location and you lot can get some nice sheen.

Painting the Confront

For the face, I started off with XYZ albedo map projection in Mari so took it into Substance for final manus-painting.

I painted the head specifically quite a bit because information technology'due south a lot more complex than the garments, making certain that I get the main hierarchy of colour relationships on their proper face parts and of class, some brush speckle for detail. I like to bake the normals and AO in ZBrush rather than doing a bake/export batch in Painter like with the garments. In the end, this gives me more control and subtlety of the face due to college-res textures like 16k.

PBR Materials

The pare shader textile was a tough ane to get right, especially every bit information technology was my beginning fourth dimension using Marmoset and trying to figure how everything works. It took many iterations of scaling the figure size in Marmoset and tweaking the variables in the shader plus post-processing to become to a decent look and experience.

I've attached some images of the settings I used for marmoset materials:

Rendering & Lighting

For my final composite renders, I made a screen capture in Marmoset with the rendering settings cranked up to the maximum. Equally for lighting, I went with the classic single spotlight with two supporting rim lights behind. I wanted the terminal mood to exist dark and horror/thriller-like so I chose a proper skylight that would support that.

Attached image shows some settings for Marmoset lights and skin shaders:

Feedback

I had a boom in the class creating this graphic symbol and learning all the new programs and pipelines. It is definitely a step up in terms of time-management and technical side when comparison it to 2nd fine art. I love that I can basically teach myself anything if I expect for the proper tutorial and ask the right people. The merely upshot is that everyone has their own way of doing and budgeted every stride so it merely shows how vast the field is. I believe I lost about a week of work because I couldn't solve certain technical issues, but things like that are a part of the pipeline heartaches.

To be honest, I like that PBR pipeline is getting more artist-friendly these days and I promise to see it advance fifty-fifty farther. When I was researching what tutorials could help me in creating this grapheme, I found Frank Tzeng's likeness tutorial on Gumroad which helped me a lot with sculpting. Simply watching him sculpt was all I needed to be a bit more confident with the human forms. As a grapheme fine art beginner, I am withal learning and gathering knowledge so I don't have plenty resources to share.

Thanks for taking a await and I hope yous won't be harsh on it! It'south my first introduction to 3D later on all. You lot can accomplish out to me regarding whatever questions as well equally 2D art since that is my expertise.

BACK TO Student INTERVIEWS

© 2022 CGMA. All rights reserved. Become a meliorate creative person ™

Share this post