구미호 (gumiho)
I’m a recent 3D art graduate from ASU and I’m currently working as a freelancer trying to find a role in a studio environment.
For this year’s challenge, I chose to make a 구미호 (gumiho), which is a nine-tailed fox creature well known in Korean mythology. In most stories, a Gumiho is a trickster and is often thought of as a malicious entity. While 9-tailed foxes exist in eastern mythology as a whole, a big distinction that can be made in the gumiho is the existence of a 여우구슬 (fox’s marble). In different stories, this marble provides power and knowledge to the gumiho and can be used to steal the life of humans.
I always try to start a project by taking some time to find references from sources like Pinterest and creating a reference board with PureRef.
For clothing references, I found photos of traditional hanboks.
For the tail, I found references for the tail placement and composition later on in the modeling process after having trouble trying to get good silhouettes.
For the face and body of my character, I found female anatomy references and found pictures of faces that I wanted my character to resemble.
I always have trouble creating 2D concepts before starting on a project and got used to just concepting in 3D. It has its downsides, but I find it to be my favorite part of the process.
I started with a very basic blockout and began to sculpt in T-Pose before ultimately creating a new pose so that I could add clothing in Marvelous Designer.
In Marvelous Designer, I created the 2D pattern for my hanbok and worked on placing the clothing in a way to get the folds and shapes I wanted. During this process, I depend a lot on my references to figure out what certain areas should look like and how long or short certain lengths should be. After getting a base for my hanbok that I was happy with, I took it into Zbrush.
In Zbrush, I started cleaning up the mesh from MD and making sure there were no artifacts or jagged edges (the smooth cloth brush came in handy here). Then I used zremesher to get new topology and since there was no polycount limit, I didn’t worry about it.
For her hair, I used an IMM curve brush to create each grouping of hair and sculpted smaller hair details into each grouping. I then created a 비녀 (binyeo), which is a korean hairpin, using zmodeler. I also made a gem-looking mesh for her 여우구슬 (fox’s marble).
For her tails, I started by creating a basic low poly tail shape that I could easily duplicate and reuse. After placing the tails and getting a decent silhouette, I started detailing.
To add more detail to the tails, I created an IMM brush for fur clumps and after placing clumps, I went back with the dam standard and orb brush and added more fur detail.
After that, I did some quick polypainting and material assigning in Zbrush to give myself a base of colors to work with when texturing in Substance Painter.
To create the low poly model for the body, I used Topogun. I edited my UVs in Maya, splitting up my character into 4 sets of UVs.
After setting up my low and high poly models, I baked my maps in Substance Painter and began adding materials and painting my textures. In Toolbag 3, I set up my scene for rendering.
And here are some more final renders!
A big thank you to Cubebrush for hosting this challenge and to any readers. Art War has always been an amazing challenge and I had so much fun while learning a lot from other talented participants. Can’t wait for the next one!
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