Mary the Toymaker
Model sculpted in ZBrush
Retopologized and UVed in Maya
Textured in Adobe Substance 3D Painter
Rendered in Arnold
Process
Over Winter break I decided to work on a personal project for my demo reel to expand my character modeling skills with more diverse characters. I found this character concept by Nicholas Kole on Art Station and fell in love with this character named Mary. I really like how while not being a "typical protagonist", she still feels like she has a very rich personality with a lot of bespoke details that add to her character. I also like seeing the representation of older women with wrinkles and under-represented body types. Her highly stylized facial features made me think she would be a good choice to diversify my portfolio to target more of a cartoony appearance.
Planning
December 18th, 2023:
Initially I wasn't sure the scope of the project I could achieve over winter break so I sketched out an idea of what an entire character model would look like with a straight on neutral pose and a T pose.
January 1st, 2024:
After celebrating the holidays and circling back to revisit my ideas, I sat down and made a game plan for the next two weeks with a rough outline for progress. I decided that limiting the scope of the project to a bust sculpt would be the best for an achievable goal.
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January 2nd, 3rd: Major primary and secondary forms
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January 4th: Hard surface props.
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January 5th, 6th: Hair
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January 7th: Tertiary face details.
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January 8th: Clothing details
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January 9th: UVs/Texture
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January 10th: Texture
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January 11th: Rendering
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January 12th: Website/Demo reel updates
Sculpting & Modeling
January 2nd, 2024:
After laying out my initial game plan, I began in ZBrush blocking out the forms for the bust sculpt.
By the end of the day I had most major pieces of the body blocked in with primitives and minimal sculpting in ZBrush.
January 3rd, 2024:
I worked on refining some of the details on the sculpt. I softened up some of the facial features after receiving feedback that I might have gotten too caught up in the structure of the face and lost some of the soft round squishiness of the original concept art.
I went through and colored my individual subtools to help me see the shapes and spacing of various elements of the sculpt in accordance to the original concept art.
I got a bit frustrated with the face and trying to find the soft squishiness so I switched gears by getting a Maya scene set up with the ZBrush geo import, and started working on hard surface props such as blocking out the glasses, paintbrush, and earrings. I also replaced the basic ZBrush sphere eyes with eyes with proper inverted geometry for the iris, pupil, and cornea.
January 4th, 2024:
I worked sporadically on the face details such as wrinkles, defining edges around the mouth and eyes, creating eyelashes, importing the glasses geo from maya, adjusting the scarf.
I started the hair a bit ahead of schedule as well and while I am still relatively new to using hair curves and encountered a lot of challenges getting them to behave without twisting or warping, I think the result I have gotten so far has been surprisingly good for the frustration it took.
January 7th, 2024:
Today I will be finishing all the hard surface assets included in the bust such as the glasses and the magnifying glass attached to them, a brush, a crayon, two pens, and the earrings.
Since the last time I worked on this project, I reached out to several 3D community discord servers for critiques on my progress, specifically looking for assistance in matching the face to the reference closer. I received feedback that the eyes and mouth might be a tad too big and to accentuate the cartoony "sweet old granny" look the sculpt would benefit from making them a bit smaller in comparison to the rest of the face.
I finished all the hard surface assets in Maya and placed them accordingly.
After a lot of trial and error, I feel pretty happy with the hair coverage I've made in ZBrush with the hair curve tools.
Lastly, I began UVing all the small hard surface accessories as well as the hair in Maya.
January 9th, 2024:
A week after starting this project I wanted to recap all I have left to do and reassess my tasks and re-prioritize my day to day schedule. I started by listing out every small task that needs to occur before I can update my reel/website with the final product in my notebook.
Based on these notes I broke up the tasks into the remaining days
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January 9th:
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Finalize hair, face, and clothing sculpt
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Retopologize geometry
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UV geometry
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January 10th:
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Texture all assets to final
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Export textures to Maya
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Set up renders
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January 11th:
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Finalize any lighting/texturing
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Render partial turns of beauty/wireframe renders
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January 12th:
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Import renders to demo reel
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Finalize blog post
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Update website with project page
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Post on socials
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I started my work by replacing some hair strands that got accidentally dynameshed into geometry not conducive to clean UV unwrapping. I finalized some of the high poly face detailing and also remeshed the head to rebuild multiple subdivision levels for normal map baking for fine sculpted details. I also went through and remeshed some of the other geometry to have a better high to low poly workflow.
My next steps are to UV unwrap all of the sculpted geometry to prep for texturing. I started with the clothes.
UVs, Retopology, & Model Prep
January 10th, 2024:
I worked a bit more unwrapping the hair and my next step is to hand retopologize the face and then unwrap that and I should be ready to texture. Currently in Maya my render looks like this with just flat materials and transparency.
January 11th, 2024:
I finished up the head and neck topology. I also completed all UVs for all the body pieces, hair, clothes, and accessories:
Texturing
January 13th, 2024:
In the final stretch of this project I spent the entire day in Substance Painter texturing all assets. Texturing was my favorite part of the process. I was already excited by the sculpt and how well the hair came out but I was itching to put some textures on the model. The character is so rich and full of creative life and I wanted to paint in the wrinkles on her face and be able to feel the stitches on each row of her sweater and her scarf.
I started by making sure everything had a base fill on it to get an overall feel of the look and then delved into each element more deeply. I hand-painted the skin details with lots of grunge brushes to get blushing and freckles. I used a mix of anisotropic noise maps to get a base for the hair that gave the illusion of each geometry piece having more hair strands. This is a technique that I later used on the main character model for my thesis film. I also used ID maps to create procedural randomness assigning a slightly different hue and value to each hair piece. I also picked specific strands to be a lighter gray to match the concept art. On top of everything I hand-painted specific strands to give a more illustrative feeling to the texture.
For the sweater I researched materials for knitwear and ended up modifying some alpha maps from Mohsen Gh on ArtStation. Additionally, I added a lot of layered noise maps to the texture to take a plain flat color base and give it the illusion of a mixed color yarn that changes dye intensity and may have flecks of other color yarn within the stitches.
Rendering & Final Model
January 18th, 2024:
After a short break to focus on the start of the semester, I returned to this project to make sure that my demo reel and social pages reflected my new project!