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MOTHMAN

Senior Thesis Short Film 2024

Mothman Character Model

Model sculpted in ZBrush

Retopologized and UVed in Maya

Textured in Adobe Substance 3D Painter

Rendered in Arnold

Concept Art

All concept art created by Avery Buffington

Process

I was tasked with creating the character model and texture of the title character for my senior thesis film Mothman. This was a long, arduous, but ultimately very rewarding task that allowed me the opportunity to really stretch my wings as a 3D artist and learn some new pipeline skills in the process. 

Beginning Concepts

A lot of debate happened over what the Mothman would look like over many weeks. Picking a specific moth species would inform our character's personality, color palette, and the overall mood of the film, and how much we wanted to deviate from other previous Mothman designs in other media and art.

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Eventually, we settled as a team on using the Emperor Moth species as a reference and striving for a design that was both somewhat humanoid and somewhat creature. We wanted to include both moth wings and pay homage to the more owlish description of the original Mothman legend.

Initial Sketches

The Mothman design was by far one of the most challenging aspects of the whole project to get right on a personal level. The overall idea and model went through many iterations and changes over time. The earliest design was almost entirely human but with antennae, wings, and fur. The following iterations were similar but included a hunch and an updated design for the face of the Painter. 

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Rough Drafts

The first few iterations of the model were quite rough and consisted of pieces of the Painter character model Frankensteined together to create an amalgamation of parts that didn't quite fit together yet harmoniously. 

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The first that that I knew was right was the wings. As the creature design was evolving and moving towards the right direction, I knew the changes to the wings would be minimal so I focused on getting the wing shapes and initial texture right with ZBrush and Substance Painter and began to experiment with building a material base for the fur to use later down the road when texturing the whole model. 

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Back to the Drawing Board

Despite my best efforts and several iterations of the initial model, I ultimately decided to try to rework the design to make it work more harmoniously. The design needed to be less humanoid and more creature and cryptid, but still have the character appeal of a main character you want to root for and not entirely a terrifying monster.

 

I called up my good friend, CU Denver Alumn, moth enjoyer, and Creature Designer Extraordinaire, Sten Weed.

Sten previously designed a creature called The Lynth for a Class of 2023 DAC Production of the same name. The design greatly inspired me so I wanted to pick their brain for ideas on how to solve my creature conundrum.  â€‹

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Together we workshopped some ideas for a fresh design that included a full bug head with big bright eyes, a hunched posture, elongated limbs, digitigrade segmented legs, clawed feet, and more fur. 

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Final Model

By this time in the semester, the pressure was really on to get a model out to rig and animate. Thankfully, I felt super confident with this new design. After a couple of short hours of sculpting, I had a very solid base for what the character would look like. What had previously taken me many hours of frustration and fiddling around with subtools in ZBrush now felt like a breeze. 

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For the hands and claws specifically, I researched more references of monster hands and owl feet to inform the design choices as I polished up the details. When blocking out the length of the limbs the hands were stretched out into these noodly sausage appendages that lost their form so I started again with a new hand base and resculpted in the bony structures, tendons, and knuckles, as well as adding claw fingernails. For the feet, I Added talons and sculpted them in the shape of the owl foot and finished them off with a fur alpha. 

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I sculpted out a rough idea of how the fur would flow on the head and neck. I mimicked the hairstyle of the Painter model and transformed it to flow back and into the thorax, chest, and neck fur. After blocking out the fur I used fur alphas to add tertiary detail and height. This breakup will be essential in giving the character model a more rough diffuse look and less like a shiny plastic toy model. 

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Retopology

Retopology went fairly quickly, especially considering the clothing had been reused from the Painter model and just refitted on the model in ZBrush but retained the same geometry and textures. The hands and head were relatively simple. The feet were the most complex element to retopologize by hand due to their unique shape which presented some interesting challenges resolving geometry around the four talons. The hair and the thorax were too complex in silhouette to retopologize by hand in the time left to complete the model, so ZRemesher had to make due.

Texturing!!!

Texturing the model was by far my favorite part of the process. It went by fairly quickly and was greatly aided by the smart materials I had set up previously to get a good head start on the fur by using curvature and ambient occlusion maps to automatically mask out specific shades for shadows and highlights on the fur and provide a general gradient on the model to start with. 

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The wing texture was my favorite part of the entire project and allowed me to use my hand painting skills to create paint strokes for each strand of fur. During the process of painting the wings, the wings were mainly brown and tan. I knew I wanted the eyes on the wings to stand out so I made them metallic and slightly emmissive, as well as the actual eyes on the head. When I was nearly done painting the wings the idea to incorporate purple hues into the shadows on the fur of the wings struck me and I feel like it helped pull the entire design together and lead the eye around with the consistency between the purple in the wings and on the vest. 

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The texture of the model was completed in about 3-4 hours which I was pleasantly surprised by. The production clock was ticking with only 12 days until the premiere screening to render and composite the few shots the character model would be in for the final cut. If I were to revisit this project now without the pressure of a deadline, I'd like to clean up the edges of the texture where the chest fur interpenetrates the vest and shirt, and where the head connects to the neck geo. The final lighting in the film which is quite dark disguises the issues, however, it is an area of growth and improvement for future projects.

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Reflection

This project represents my biggest undertaking in a production setting to date. I had many challenges and setbacks that made completing this piece very daunting and sometimes overwhelming. Before the design had been finalized and the final character model had started coming together, I was often anxious about whether I could complete this model to a level that my group and I would be proud of. This was the second character model I created in a collaborative production pipeline and it was the first full-body non-human model I had ever created. â€‹I learned through the design process how long to trust my instincts and struggle, and when to pivot and ask for feedback and input.

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I am very proud of the final model. While there are things that if revisited I would like to improve on, I think this character model represents a large amount of personal growth in my character modeling. It provided me with challenges to solve and areas I was able to flex my hand-painting skills and sculpting ability. I look forward to creating more models in the future with the skills I've learned and strengthened through this project.

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