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Writer's pictureAvery Buffington

Winter Break Project - Mary the Toymaker: 1/1/2024 - 1/14-2024

Updated: Oct 11

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.


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.


  • January 2nd, 3rd: Major primary and secondary forms

  • January 4th: Hard surface props.

  • January 5th, 6th: Hair

  • January 7th: Tertiary face details.

  • January 8th: Clothing details

  • January 9th: UVs/Texture

  • January 10th: Texture

  • January 11th: Rendering

  • January 12th: Website/Demo reel updates


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 temporarily 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 reprioritize 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

  • January 9th:

    • Finalize hair, face, and clothing sculpt

    • Retopologize geometry

    • UV geometry

  • January 10th:

    • Texture all assets to final

    • Export textures to Maya

    • Set up renders

  • January 11th:

    • Finalize any lighting/texturing

    • Render partial turns of beauty/wireframe renders

  • January 12th:

    • Import renders to demo reel

    • Finalize blog post

    • Update website with project page

    • Post on socials


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.


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:


January 13th, 2024:

In the final stretch of this project I spent the entire day in Substance Painter texturing all assets.




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!




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