Hello! My name is Matur Chechek. I am 25 years old. I live in Russia in the city of Voronezh. Here, I took courses in 3d on the class of sculpture. These courses gave me a good base! Before that, I worked as an ordinary manager in a public institution and my old job was just boring for me. After the courses I worked a little in the field of CG. There I met my boyfriend, who taught me how to create a character completely and animate a little. Now I am doing freelancing. And I really like to take part in contests in my free time or just do something for myself.

In this article I will try to describe the process of creating my work "HOUND". This project I did in my free time for the competition Art War III.

Choosing a Character

For a long time in my head there was a story of a character in which a cyborg was made of a cat. It was based on two heroes - a raccoon from the Guardians of the Galaxy and Wolverine from X-Men. Both of them were subjected to experiments and both subsequently chose the path of the hero. I begin my work with collecting references, which are supplemented.

Having collected suitable references on the internet, I began to sculpture.

Blocking

 I started with a primitive blocking, throwing an approximate amount of character, picking up his height and proportions.

After finishing the blocking, I continued to work on the detail and the hardsurface. Here, I decided to sketch the design of the legs and gloves in Zbrush, but since this is the first serious hardsurface in my life, I made a mistake because later I spent a lot of time on retopology.

I immediately modeled some small elements in 3DMax. I didn’t want to age or wear materials too much, so I decided to leave some details for textures. At this stage, the high-poly model was ready and I began work on mid-poly.

Topology

I do a rotopology in Maya, I believe that there are the most convenient tools for this. I rewolded the body completely.

While the legs and gloves were (for the most part) modeled and new elements and mechanisms were added to them.

UV, Baking Maps and Master Model

I unfolded all the details in Maya. Since the number of UV sets was unlimited, I didn’t worry about what to lay out and how. I had a body separately, a glove separately, a suit and a spine separately and a leg was spread out on own UV map. Also, the character had eyes and teeth that lay on separate UV maps. In total, I had 6 UV sets per character.

After the mid-poly model was split into UV sets, I started baking the maps. Normal maps I bake in Substance Painter, and Displacement in Zbrush. What was modeled was done under smoothing. All my maps were baked at a resolution of 4096. And yes, while doing a retopology and baking, you need to remember to keep the mid-poly in the same position and size as the high-poly, otherwise it will not work. After topology and baking, I prepare the model for setup, increase it to the optimal size, mirror the necessary objects and put the model on the grid. On this final mesh is ready, I call it the master model.

Textures 

When the model is ready and it has detail maps, I proceed to texturing. As I have already said, I did not specifically begin to add minor scratches, scuffs and textures of materials to the model in order to have more freedom in texturing. Creating each material, I began with the simple and moved to the difficult. Also, each object I textured separately, sorting them by UV. At the very beginning, I was texturing body of the character using standard materials and filled the desired color to determine the appearance. After that, I began to work through each material in detail. When all the basic materials were ready, I began to add scuffs, scratches and dust. For this, I used the mask generators that are in the Substance Painter.

All objects are made on the same principle described above. Depending on the size and importance of the map object, I save it in different resolutions, the largest turned out to be at the body - 8k, and for such objects as teeth there are enough 2k textures. I exported maps for rendering in Arnold for Maya, picking up my set.

Setup 

Maya is best suited for Setup. I take my master model and start with the skeleton assembly. Since the character needed to be simply put in a pose, then Setup was not required beyond complex settings. When I was convinced that the skeleton tests with a primitive coloring work adequately, that is, the pivot points are where they should be, I proceeded to the final coloring with hard painting.

On the final skin, I threw a standard modifier Maya 2018 - Delta Mush, as it gives a smooth mesh deformation. Some points had to be tinted by hand to emphasize the joints, such as the knee, elbow, and other. Now I can create controls to manage and configure the IK-FK system. I modeled the emotion for the cat separately and attached it via blendshape. Clothing was attached to the character through the wrap, so that it smoothly repeated the deformation of the body. At this setup was over.

Pose, Setting Materials and Render (Arnold)

Now that I have a mesh, setup, and textures, I can customize the scene for the render. Here it all starts with setting up materials. The body was the first to assemble, as this is the only material that has a Displacement channel. First you need to connect all the maps that we receive when exporting. For each map set its value. For diffuse cards, setting is not particularly needed. I only connected Displacement and base color to subsurface color to my body.

And Displacement connected through node Displacement shader.

Next, I set up the metal. I used only two cards here, because at that time I thought that was enough, it was base color and roughness.

Most of the settings were on the material of rubber and fabric. Normal map has already been connected here, via the bump channel.

In the render scene, I used 5 light sources. One of them is the ambient luminaire (dome light).

Having made a test render and twisted the fixtures to the result that suited me, I put the character in an epic pose and began to make the final render. Adding the background, dust and description in Photoshop - I received the final image for the contest.

Thank you for reading my article, it will be great if you find something useful for yourself here.

You can follow Matur on Facebook.