Studio Project: 3D Character

Unfortunately having assignments is inevitable when you're at school. Sometimes you get the ones that you like and sometimes the ones that you don't really give a shit care about. So I'm really happy that we were given a chance to make something that was something more personal, hence the studio project!

I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to make a 3D model of one of my characters. Among the many characters I've designed, I have very few favorites design wise.. Personality wise I like them all equally. But anyways I chose to do a character from a project I'm doing together with my friend (Entitled Ingressio for now). The project hasn't updated in a while due to busy schedules but it's definitely something I'm willing to develop further. Hopefully I'll get some time during the break.

Here are the concept artwork I drew using Photoshop(3 views) and SAI(pose);

More information and images under the cut!



Her name is Remyl and she's my top favorite among my designed characters. I feel that she is very balanced. (I also like poofy clothing) Initially she had four wings but I've decided to cut it down to two.. It might change in the future though.

Drawing her concept sheet went unbelievably smooth. It was odd because I don't draw as much as I did before.. So where did it all come out? Hopefully I'm not too too rusty yet in the drawing department. One thing is that I failed to do was to align my concepts properly. Because of that I had a tiny bit of a hard time modeling her and making sure everything is perfectly aligned. (ie. front view face aligned to side view face etc) so that's something I need to do in the future when drawing a character turn around. Make sure everything is aligned!


Now onto the modeling part! I used Maya 2012 for modeling.

This is the only work in progress of the mesh that I only salvaged.. I actually really enjoyed modeling her legs for some reason.. Another good thing is that Remyl's design is meant to be symmetrical. You know what that means? Do half of the model, then duplicate special on the other side and merge! That way everything is symmetrical and it saves you a lot of work down the road. Duplicate special is the equivalent of copying/pasting.

Probably the most nerve wracking to model were the hands.. I'm pretty sure I spent 2 or 3 weeks just getting a hand done and it's not even that much accurate to an actual hand.

This is the final hand that I've made. It certainly took a lot of patience, referencing, and tweaking. I initially used a man's hand from a tutorial I found online but later on I decided to break away from my reference because.. well Remyl is a girl. So I took a look at my own hands for reference right after I got the general shape done. I thought drawing hands were already hard enough. Modeling them was certainly a challenge as well.

Another challenging part was the face. I made sure to leave the face for last because I just know how much grief it will actually cause me. Overall making the face was not too bad because I got a lot of help from a friend of mine who knows a lot about 3D and character making. Youtube tutorials also helped me a lot. I thought the face would take me many weeks but it actually took me a day to get the general shape and another week to tweak it according to my own liking. Just like the hands, it's a lot of aligning to your reference and editing the vertices. Also making sure that the face still looks like a face from different sides. A good knowledge about facial anatomy was also a plus.. All those years of drawing faces sure payed off!

Here's what the final face looks like. I'm not 100% satisfied with it as I think that her cheeks should "puff" out a little more. I find it too flat. As you can see my ears aren't too developed. She'll have hair that covers them so I thought I shouldn't bother too much making them look good.

The funnest thing to model for me was the hair. I liked making the pointy shapes and modeling them to look like hair. I put a bunch of planes together to make the hair. One being the "main" hair and the others being extra hair that kinda just sit on top and under the main hair to get the layered look.

Now she looks more like a person! Well, sort of anyway. In the end I imported my model to Zbrush to make some tweaks and smooth out some things.

This here is the final mesh. The planes on her back will be wings for later. Looks boring huh? But the icing for the cake is just about to be made!

Textures time!

Well here's my favorite part. I love painting and drawing and that's how I initially got into the whole art stuff until the point of where I am in my life right now.
I used Photoshop CS5, SAI and Body Paint 3D (projection painting) for texture painting.

Before going into painting mode, I had to unwrap the UVs of the models first. It's simply the process of making your mesh into some kind of paper craft layout. Imagine your models being made out of paper put together, the UV layout is basically the flat version of your 3D model. I'm not sure how to explain it exactly but here's an image of the unwrapped UV layout.

Unwrapping UVs usually take quite a bit of time. But it's not something that normally makes me pull my hair out. In some cases it does but it's not really that bad of a job overall. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by re-duplicating the half of the body but on the other hand I thought having a little of asymmetry would be kind of nice.
So in order to paint the model, I had to paint on the UV layout using software like Photoshop. And from there it will translate my painting over to the model. Here's what my final painting looked like:

My usual coloring style had to change a little bit as I find it a little weird to have my model painted in the way I normally paint. I had to experiment a bit to see which coloring style worked the best. I didn't get off too much from my style really.

However there's only so much you can do with painting on a flat plane. There were a lot of seams that needed to be covered. Plus painting the face and the hair on a flat plane was not the best if you really wanted to paint it more accurately. So I had to use Body Paint 3D which allowed me to do projection painting! It basically lets me paint over the model in 3D form. Which helps me get rid of seams and to paint things more precisely. Specifically the face and the hair. Maya doesn't let you do projection painting which makes me a little sad. Here's a screenshot that I salvaged during my painting processes in Body Paint:

Normally you'd think that it's a lot better to paint in projection paint, but I still did a good chuck of painting in the 2D mode. Painting over the edges on projection painting sometimes leads to painting over to the other side of the model and sometimes to other parts, which you don't want to happen of course. Switching between 3D and 2D painting was the way I did it. Get the general painting, color layout by the 2D painting, and paint over the seams and adjust using 3D projection painting. With the exceptions of hair and the face which you absolutely got to have projection painting to do so accurately.

After hours and days of painting the textures, here's the final product:

Click to see full size!
I was mainly going for the hand painted cartoony look. Like the style you'd see in Kingdom Hearts and the Tales of games. (Tales of Xillia for the most part) This is where playing/replaying video games come into place. Studying videogames was fun alright. I played a little bit of some hand painted games during my free(?) time to mainly get inspiration as to how my model would look.

Not too bad for my very first character model. I could have done things a lot better on some areas so I might go back to this and fix some things. For now, I am finished! School didn't really teach us how to model characters. We've always modeled.. inanimate objects and things like that. We're rarely asked to model organic material but in the way we were taught, we'd have the rough idea on how to make them. However for making characters I had to find video tutorials (google and youtube were my best friends) and learn a lot on my own, together with the help of my friends and the internet. Knowing the human anatomy and all my drawing lessons really helped me a lot during the process. The results are more than what I expected so I am actually very proud of myself.

Total time spent: Approximately 3 months if you have more than just studio project to work on.
At the time I was also working on assignments for my other classes (mainly graphic design and my 3D major class and some others) so this is a very rough estimate. If I sacrificed my other classes and spent more time on my studio this probably would have looked a lot better.

Technical Breakdown:

Polys: 9774 (A standard for PS3, xbox360, wii gameplay)
Diffuse map (texture resolution): 2048x2048, hand painted

Software used:
Maya 2012 (Modeling, Rendering)
Zbrush (Model adjustments)
Photoshop CS5, Paint tool SAI (Texture Painting)
Body Paint 3D (Projection Painting)


Thank you so much for reading!

Update:
Video Reel is up!