• Pre Production
• Gathering References
• Facial Sculpting
• Zwrap head detail
• Anatomy Sculpting
• Marvelous Designer
• Armour Sculpting
• IMM’s, Nanomesh, Micropoly
• High Res Detail
• Finished High Poly
• Retopology Head
• Retopology Body
• UV Unwrapping
• Exploding the mesh
• Skin Textures
• Clothes Textures
• Armour Textures
• Setting up a scene in marmoset
• Rigging
• Final Renders
• My initial goal for this project was to find a concept that would challenge my existing abilities to their fullest extent while forcing me to explore new ones in order to complete the concept; This would allow me to grow as an artist and create more interesting and complex pieces in the future. I eventually stumbled upon this interpretation of the classic teenage mutant ninja turtles character, Shredder
• I was drawn to the idea right away and thought that this would be the ideal challenge for me, with more intricate clothing and hard surface modelling than I had ever encountered with a character before, but with a grounded design I could find plenty of references for. I quickly got in touch with the creator of the original artwork (deviantart.com/emilcabaltierra) and asked for permission to use their work, to which they agreed.
• When creating my 3D character model of Samurai Shredder, I plan to incorporate the theme of "Fight or Flight” creating a visually striking representation of a samurai who is always prepared to defend their honour. I want to make sure to emphasize the warrior's readiness for battle, so I will focus on the imposing stature of the model, with its weapons at the ready and its expression determined.
• During the brief 6 weeks I endeavoured to develop my 3D character, I would do my best to mimic the realistic art style of the game Ghost of Tsushima.
• I collected historical references and images of game models that I could refer to throughout the development process and saved them in pureref. There are many different styles of samurai armour in real life and in Ghost of Tsushima, so I felt I had a lot of creative freedom with the concept I wanted to create.
• I also saved screenshots of each iteration of my model in pureref so I could easily compare images as I request feedback.
• I started by creating the character's face using the mesh I had previously created for another character. I strongly draw inspiration from actors Hiroyuki Sanada and Daniel Dae Kim to give my character a more believable and distinct appearance. My tutor helped me till I was happy in the areas where it was tough for me to advance. I often went back to the face while I was sculpting the rest of my character model and made small tweaks to continuously improve the model.
• Much later into the sculpting process, I opted to use a high poly photo scanned face model from 3DScanStore (3dscanstore.com) to capture more realistic pore details in the face after I had finished the high poly sculpt of my face and had achieved the general form I was going for. In order to apply the detail without jeopardising my own work, I wrapped the high poly model to my mesh using the ZWrap plugin (www.russian3dscanner.com/zwrap/).
• I used a mesh I had already made as the character's base mesh because, as was already mentioned, I knew the majority of it would be covered and it would save me a massive amount of time. It became apparent that the mesh's original proportions didn't fit the idea I was working with as I blocked out my character's clothing and armour. I tweaked the proportions of my character using the transpose master tool after getting input from my tutor and peers to make Shredder look much powerful and frightening. I conducted a survey of my peers to determine which ratios best reflected the concept, and we decided on selection 3 overall.
• I've never had the chance to use Marvelous Designer before because I generally choose to create my own clothes folds from scratch, but for this project I wanted to explore a potentially more efficient workflow.
• To get a basic knowledge of the tools, I watched this video tutorial (youtube.com/watch?v=h7mK4x8-jd8). I then looked for videos that made outfits resembling the one in my concept and referenced the sewing patterns of kimono's online that I could recreate within Marvelous.
• I used the mesh I had created so far as the avatar in marvelous so that the clothes would fit seamlessly after exporting them to zbrush, resulting in less cleanup Afterwards, anytime I returned to marvelous to create a new layer of clothing over what already exists, I would create a new dynamesh'd version of my character/avatar so that the clothes underneath wouldn't be interfered with by the new layers.Although I may have spent too much time making the outfits appear perfect when they would ultimately be hidden by numerous other layers, it was a skill that will undoubtedly be useful to me when I am building characters in the future.
• I'd start by extracting the Armour from the body mesh or building it from a standard primitive. I used ZModeller because it allowed me to create hard surface models with even topology that I could cleanly sculpt on without me needing to switch back and forth between different software's. I also found using polygroups a really effective way to edit the topology of a mesh quickly and easily.
• To prevent having to repeatedly generate the same assets where they were required, I utilised Zmodeller to create a few blade IMMs that I could quickly place over my armour. On Artstation, I also discovered some helpful IMMs that I could utilise sparingly in my work, such as nanomesh scales for the scale male armour and little threads that I could put throughout the model in different places. I also used micropoly across the mesh to generate ropes, chainmail and details on the sandals.
• artstation.com/marketplace/p/R6d/samurai-kitthreads-and-knots
• artstation.com/marketplace/p/RyN/samurai-kit-rivets
• artstation.com/marketplace/p/Ympz/scale-armor-immnano-mesh-edging-imm
• I used a combination of Zbrush brushes, custom brushes from art station and surface noise generators to create dents, erosion, scratches, wear and tear. I planned to combine this with further detailing later in substance painter.
• artstation.com/marketplace/p/VnOj/ea sy-metal-surface-brushes-pack
• I used 3D coat to perform retopology on my mesh as it the software I am most familiar with using.
• I tried to maintain an even poly density across the entire mesh, with more detail in areas where it was required such as the head.
• I combined all of the clothing under the armour into a single mesh that was combined with the head, because it would reduce clipping during the rigging process and would massively reduce my workload compared to retopologising every layer of the character independently. I also chose to do this because they did not overly effect the silhouette compared to the armour that would be covering them.
• Unfortunately I started running out of time at this point in the project, and wanted to focus on implementing the main pieces I had created into substance painter, rather than worrying about small details that I could implement later.
• I aimed to keep the majority of my hard surface model UV’s straight and well packed to save as much UV space for my textures as I possibly could. I used the straighten selection tool to achieve this mostly and also created a seam along every sharp edge to help any visual problems caused by the metalness map.
• I mostly split my materials by their type and packed them using texel density tools built into 3Ds Max. I gave sufficient edge padding (16px for 2048 / 32px for 4096)
• I used a 4k resolution for all of my texture maps, as this is a portfolio piece and downscaling textures to be more optimised holds up much better than trying to upscale it from a low quality texture.
• For the more organic shapes in the clothes, I struggled to pack them as tightly as I had done previously in the armour. I planned to research into straightening UV shells, but only found guides for maya and my time was running out.
• https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/optimal-value-for-uv-padding-island-marginin-blender/116908
• I exploded the mesh within marmoset before baking to reduce baking errors across my assets. Using this process allowed me to make adjustments to my low poly model and preserve the baked maps, as long as the UV layout doesn’t change. I also made sure to bake my object ID’s from the separate polygroups I had exported from Zbrush. This helped me later in Substance as I could easily mask the area I was texturing instead of doing It manually.
• When texturing the skin I referenced this video to help guide me through the process youtube.com/watch?v=GcI60mKZU0k&t=81s
• I started by first building up the subdermal layers of the skin before moving onto the epidermal layers. I continued the process, adding subtle colour variation and added details like veins, blemishes and freckles. All of these layers come together to build up a more realistic final outcome.
• I added more details around the lips and eyes, and changed the coloured layers of the skin to make Shredder appear more Asian like his armour would suggest.
• As a final detail I used some details from the albedo of the head I used from 3D scan store, such as the eyebrows which I later darkened. This would help me ground shredder further in realism in areas I may have missed in my hand painted texture.
Pushing details
Baked Albedo Final Touches
• I followed this video to create the base for my texturing process within substance painter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piiIzR4jFj8
From here, I built up more subtle details in the fabrics using height and traditional Japanese patterns that I downloaded from this website and turned into an alpha (nippon.com/en/japandata/h00478/traditional-japanesepatterns.html)
• I also used height and substance painter alphas to build up detail in the ropes of my character which originally were just a flat cylinder.
• The armour posed a greater challenge for me to texturize, which was made worse by the fact that I lacked a clear notion or strategy for how to approach this part in a way that I thought was visually appealing. After failing a few times, I finally tried to make the armour's textures look realistic by colourmatching the base hues from the concept art and progressively adding damage using various noise generators and noise masks. During this process I learnt that samurai traditionally use steel for their armour instead of iron like I originally thought, so I had to go back and change my textures to reflect this.
• After I reached a point I was satisfied with in my texturing, I also added some subtle dirt and grunge to the textures in places that made sense, effecting roughness, colour and even height in places to help break up the metalness the sandals on the ground and some small crevices of armour were the areas most effected. I switched between hand painting and using more generators to achieve the outcome I wanted.
• I packed all my textures into RGB channels when exporting from substance as it’s a more optimised way to store the images and I would have less files to keep track of.
• I initially followed this video that shows how to produce iron armour but had to stray away when creating steel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIafS5qmS8k&ab_channel=EsmailGhadrdani
• I experimented with a few different lighting set ups that would show off my character in a satisfying way that would also show off the details I had worked on. For some final renders, I would composite shredder against a Ghost of Tsushima background, which I would attach to the camera and set up as a HDRI to give the metal more accurate reflections.
• I used accurig to create a base rig for the characters body and then used blender to weight paint the armour correctly to the bone its attached too. This way, I could place the bones much faster than doing it manually in blender and adding the armour afterwards means it wouldn’t distort and stretch as the body moved. I dissolved the bones that I didn’t need from the accurig skeleton which allowed me to quickly and easily generate a pose for my character compared to manually rigging my character from scratch.
• Emilcabaltierra. (2016). Emilcabaltierra. Deviantart. deviantart.com/emilcabaltierra
• 3dscanstore. https://www.3dscanstore.com/blog/Free-3D-Head-Model
• Zwrap. www.russian3dscanner.com/zwrap
• Flipped Normals. (2019). Introduction to Marvelous Designer for 3D Artists. Youtube. youtube.com/watch?v=h7mK4x8-jd8
• D.K. Samurai Kit - Threads and Knots. ArtStation. artstation.com/marketplace/p/R6d/samurai-kit-threads-and-knots
• D.K. Samurai Kit - Rivets. ArtStation. artstation.com/marketplace/p/RyN/samurai-kit-rivets
• V.S. cale Armor IMM Nano Mesh + Edging IMM. ArtStation. https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/Ympz/scale-armor-imm-nano-mesh-edging-imm
• V.S. Easy Metal Surface Brushes pack. ArtStation. https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/VnOj/easy-metal-surface-brushes-pack
• Melviso. Head Topology. Polycount. https://polycount.com/discussion/212635/head-topology-question
• J.C. How to make HAND PAINTED SKIN Textures in SUBSTANCE PAINTER. Youtube. youtube.com/watch?v=GcI60mKZU0k&t=81s
• E.G. Warrior Helmet - Texturing In Substance Painter - Metal Material. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIafS5qmS8k&ab_channel=EsmailGhadrdani
• RealIllusion. Accurig. ActorCore. https://actorcore.reallusion.com/auto-rig
• Danduw. Texturing a shirt in substance painter [BEGINNER TUTORIAL]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piiIzR4jFj8
• Traditional Japanese Patterns. Nippon. (nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00478/traditional-japanese-patterns.html)