In this article, Alsu Rakhimova explains how she created her recent piece “No home left to love” based on the concept by Jude Smith; covering the main steps she followed from gathering references and sculpting, to rendering.
Alsu Rakhimova is a 3D Character Artist from Vancouver, B.C., and a recent graduate at Think Tank Training Centre.
In this article, she is going to explain how she created her recent piece “No home left to love” based on the concept by Jude Smith; covering the main steps she followed from gathering references and sculpting, to rendering.
Hi everyone! My name is Alsu and I am a 3D Character Artist based in Vancouver, Canada. My journey in 3D started in 2020 when my friend told me about the 3D industry opportunities in Vancouver. Then I decided to learn more about the pipeline by following tutorials by Tobias Kepp and Yulia Sokolova.
I was studying daily and enjoyed every moment of it. As a result, I created a couple of stylised 3D pieces. However, I knew that it would take me years to achieve the desired skill level if I kept studying on my own. Thus, I decided to enrol in 3D school and picked Think Tank Training Centre’s online program. Based on The Rookies ratings, it is one of the best CG schools and it has an intensive online program. While studying at school, I created such pieces as “Swordfish Shack”, “SWAT Warrior”, and “No home left to love”, that got recognised by well-known 3D online publishers.
In this article, I am going to tell how I created “No home left to love” based on the concept by Jude Smith. My mentors were Kestutis Rinkevicius and Karamjit Chahal. They taught me a lot and gave me valuable feedback throughout the project.
I will cover the following steps:
Having a reference board is a must if you want to create a believable character. I had several groups of references:
Planning is a very important step as it allows you to break down a complicated project into smaller simpler parts.
I created the blockout of the character in Zbrush. I called it ready when every single detail of the character was created. It could be made either by a simple form, dynamesh shape or with pen brush. At this stage, finding the right proportions and size of each element was the priority, thus, I kept every object simple and as low poly as possible. This way, I could change the shape / size / location so that it matched the concept as closely as possible.
Do not rush the blockout as it will be harder to make the big changes later.
Setting up the right scale of the character is also better to do early - you want it to be a real-life scale. A simple trick for that is to create a 160-170cm height shape (average person’s height) in Maya and to import it as an obj file into your Zbrush scene before starting the project. It will automatically adjust the brush sizes. Having a real-life scale is very important for sculpting details, texturing, and shading.
After the blockout was ready, it was time to clean the shapes and add details in Zbrush. To create nice and clean shapes, I relied on the basic Zbrush features like Zremesher, Booleans (to merge or cut out nice shapes), Zmodeler, and Masking. Below, I will show the main steps I followed for different elements of the outfit.
To recreate an interesting woven pattern on the skirt, I divided the skirt into even stripes. Later I “weaved” the stripes into the pattern with the Move tool. I got this idea from the work of Daniel Bystedt, who was creating characters for “Adam”, a short film by Unity. You can see the main steps in the image below.
Before sculpting the robotic arms and legs, I wanted to understand their mechanics. I studied a lot of references from other 3D Artists, and photos of prosthetic arms and legs. It helped me to understand the working logic of these assets and to create a more or less believable look. As soon as I finished the primary shapes, I cleaned them up and added details. I applied the following techniques for that:
2. Add bevels for smooth edges - avoid sharp ends as it creates a very artificial look to the armour. The nice round edges will catch more highlights.
3. To give your hard surface a finished look, add small details using alphas and IMM brushes.
Don't be afraid to slightly deform the armour, add scratches and bumps - it will add a lived-in look
4. Make sure to keep the balance of details on your hard surface object. Don’t overload one area with details, while keeping other areas untouched.
To add a seam pattern to the vest edges, I created a simple seam brush and added it to all my edges using the “Frame mesh by Polygroups” function. You can learn how to create a seam brush from this tutorial on Zbrush YouTube. After, I added folds around seams to add the interaction between the cloth and the seam.
I created a bag in Marvelous Designer to save time on sculpting big folds. To give the bag volume, I made a blue “pillow” and placed it inside the bag.
Once the bag was ready, I exported it back to Zbrush to add more details, like creases and buckles.
Before I sculpted the face, I gathered a lot of references from Pinterest. I collect photos of the face from different angles to attempt likeness. I also gather skull references to make sure that the anatomy is right.
I usually start from a sphere for practice and to also have the freedom of changing the big shapes. Once I am happy with the result, I use WARP by R3DS to wrap the proper head topology around my dynamesh sculpt. For this project, I decided to use a displacement map from 3D scan store. The advantage of this map was that it provided a quite clean displacement and albedo map. This way, you could project topology, albedo, wrinkles and pores in one action.
After a displacement map was on, there were still areas that needed manual adjustments. They needed cleanups and definitions. Zbrush’s layers system and morph brush were very helpful for that. I used Daniel Boschung’s high-resolution photos as references for pores and wrinkles.
I retopologised all objects in Maya using the Quadraw tool. I decimated my highpoly sculpt, exported it to Maya, made it “Live”, and then used Quadraw tool to draw the low poly mesh on top of it. There are no shortcuts in this step. I just started with big polygons trying to get the shape and flow and then added subdivisions where needed. The goal was to get an even retopology and get the proper silhouette that will be easy to rig later.
I unwrapped my UVs in Rizom. This app was great as it straightened and optimized UVs very well and it had very convenient cut tool. As I result, straightened UVs were very easy to pack. The publishers have a discount on Rizom UV Virtual Spaces for students and YouTube tutorials to get new users started.
Here are the main principles that I learned while texturing the character:
Substance 3D Painter files can become heavy very fast. The tips that I followed to improve the performance of my texturing files:
Below, I am going to share the main steps while sculpting different materials.
Leather is a very interesting material that has a lot of colour and roughness variation. I try to show the different degrees of worn-out leather: from small scratches to cracks. The latter ones are usually at the places where leather tends to bend a lot (e.g straps). Don’t be afraid to draw big scratches, but make sure to use references so that you don’t overdo it.
My character had several design elements that were made of leather. To avoid repetitiveness, I made sure to play with the texture, tones and colours, and the level of wearing out. This helped to distinguish leather objects into separate interesting pieces.
While sculpting the metals, I tried switching between environment maps (my favourite one is “panorama”). The reason was, that a neutral environment map didn't show the metal texture properly. As with leather, I tried to add as much colour variation to the base colours as possible to make them interesting. To give the metals worn out feel, I applied several effects:
To create the effect of torn edges on the cape, I used an Opacity channel in Substance Painter. In this channel, I drew the torn edges with a ‘Pencil' brush.
To create Base Colour for the skin, I used a lot of procedural layers in Substance 3D Painter. I had different layers for the skin blemishes, tonal maps, veins and arteries, freckles and sunspots. I completed the skin texture by adding small dirt spots and scratches.
I like adding skin imperfections as they make the character look more alive. For this project, I wanted the character to have a tired and worn-out look. Therefore, I added dark circles under her eyes, dry flakes and cracks to her lips, and small scratches on her nose and cheeks.
Below, I am showing some of the main texture channels that I used to create the skin shader in Marmoset:
I then exported all my texture maps to Marmoset and created the skin shader. You can see the parameters on the screenshot attached. To add more details to the skin, I added skin micronormals from Texturing XYZ. While creating the Subsurface Scattering map, I used the default marmoset Colour as the base. As mentioned before, having the character be a real-life scale is very important as the SSS settings are controlled on the mm scale.
Skin shader settings depend on the character you are trying to make. I tweak the texture maps and shader settings a lot before I achieve the desired result.
Before creating hair, I gathered a lot of references. I also created a ZBrush sculpt to understand the shape, hair flow, and the main hairstyle sections. This helped a lot with determining what types of hair strands had to be created.
For hair creation, I followed a real-time pipeline using hair cards. In short, I created hair cards in XGen, rendered them on one plane in Arnold, and then manually placed them on the character’s skull. While working on hair, I followed the class provided by Think Tank Training Centre. I also consulted with a lot of articles explaining real-time hair workflow, including:
I created the following hair texture maps (you can see them below). I am going to explain how I created each of them:
To place the hair cards layer by layer, I used the Hair Grabber tool by Alex Sizov for Maya. I started with thick and dense hair cards to cover the scalp and to create a general hair shape. Then, I moved to thinner and sparser hair cards to add breakups and finish the hairstyle shape. In the end, I added a lot of flyaways and separate hairs to hide the ‘gamy’ feel of the hair cards. Adding these cards was crucial to creating the so-called ‘halo’ effect when a lot of separate hairs are coming out of their main hairstyle.
While placing hair cards, I kept them in groups (layers) - it allowed me to easily control and fix the hair layers when needed.
Once the hair placement was done, I tested the hair shader in Marmoset. Using the trial and error method, I set up the hair shader with my hair textures (please see the settings below).
To create believable feathers, I decided to use photo scans of real crow feathers from Quixel. The Scan had albedo, roughness, normal, opacity, and ambient occlusion map. I slightly adjusted them and also painted the missing ones (please see all the textures in the image below). Below, I will explain how I created/edited each of them:
The final feather textures can be seen below.
I used these textures to create a shader in Marmoset (please see the screenshot).
I manually placed all the feathers on the character’s left shoulder. Then I mirrored them and manually tweaked the feathers on the right shoulder to get rid of the symmetry. I started with the bottom feathers and then moved up layer by layer closer to her face.
Besides photo renders, I decided to create a small video and animated the character’s cape in Marvelous Designer. I did it using ‘Wind controller’. I followed these steps:
I created a quite simple lighting setup - I used very big rectangular lights for my main, fill, and rim lights. I also added several lights drawing attention to the face and outfit elements.
As soon as I created very basic textures, I loaded the character in Marmoset Toolbag 4. This way, I could see how my textures would look in the final render right away.
For my camera settings, I used the following setup (please see below). I used the recently introduced ACES tone mapping. It adds more depth to shaders even though makes the scene look darker. I slightly increased the brightness of my lights to compensate for this effect.
I kept my rendering settings standard but turned on Ray Tracing. It is a great feature that made the interaction of surfaces with light more realistic. Though rendering takes more time, it is definitely worth the result (please see the image below to compare).
I also added a simple background using the ‘Backdrop’ feature.
As a touch-up to the scene, I also added some floating particles to make the background more interesting. I used this Youtube tutorial to add animated particles.
I learned a lot thanks to my mentors and the feedback from my classmates at Think Tank. It has been a challenging yet rewarding experience that helped me to further improve my 3d character artist skills. I hope this article is helpful for someone who is also learning the pipeline for creating real-time characters.
If you have any more questions about the pipeline, feel free to reach out on The Rookies, Artstation, Instagram or LinkedIn.