Timeline
14 weeks, 2024
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‍Role
‍Character Modeling • Hair Groom • PBR Texturing • Light & Rendering
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‍Project Medium
Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 4, Unreal Engine 5, Xgen

Goal
In a 14-week Advanced Digital Sculpture class, I transformed the character and her weapons from its concept through sculpting, retopologizing, texture development, and hair grooming.
- Game ready Topology
- Realistic Texture
- Maximizing the charm of the concept art

Topology - Balancing detailed design with a reasonable poly-count

Concept Art

- Bold and expressive, with dynamic brush strokes and sharp shape language.

- While this drew me in initially, it also posed a challenge in deciding how to translate these elements into the final design. I had to redo the texture and sculpt after the first version because the style wasn’t clear enough. Huge thanks to JonnyD for the stunning concept
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Skin Texture Development

Sculpting the wrinkles, pores, and pimples by referencing Glaucolonghi's article of Facial Skin Texture Development on Zbrush Central.

Then Baking the sculpted details in Marmoset Toobags.

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Based on my research into cross-polarized photography and RBX imaging of human skin, I meticulously layered textures into the dermis and sub-dermis, achieving detailed representation of blood vessels, flesh, and organic color distributions in specific areas.

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Hair

1. Hair Mesh Block-out

2. Rebuild surface to generate hair curves

Ivory Bow: Character Weapon

Topology

Grey Box

Sculpting in ZBrush

UV Maps

To optimize the texture space, I stacked partially the symmetrical parts to save UV space.
Only symmetrical faces that are visually close to each other were treated separately. In this way, the texture has variations among the symmetrical parts even though most of those textures are identical.