Sam Rosario is an aspiring 3D Character Artist and indie game lover. He graduated from RISD in '16, he's been 3D modeling with the dream of one day making 3D art for a living.

When not toiling away in the polygon mines he can often be found browsing for teen comedies on Netflix, playing addictive rogue-lite indie games, and watching bald Canadian twitch streamers.

His Art War entry, Portalgeist, was chosen as one of the Round 1 Finalists. Here, he takes us through the creation.

I started Art War III as soon as it started. I knew it was coming up and when the announcement came out that it was officially on I was extremely hyped for it since I was freshly out of work and would have the time to see the entire contest through and complete something in time. With my immediate surge of boundless energy, the first thing I did was think about how I wanted to approach the Heroes vs. Villains theme. I knew I wanted to take a Super Hero vibe to it immediately. I spent the first day watching Boku no Hero Academia, poking through the wiki to pore over powers and trying to think of a super power that could make for an engaging hero or villain. I'm really partial to simple powers with creative applications, so I tried to eliminate anything too complicated to easily display and anything too simple because I didn't think I'd find it as interesting to just have a super strength man. 

I wound up settling on a couple of things to start off with. First was a Bubble Man who generated indestructible bubbles, inspired by one part Steven Universe and one part Bartholomew Kuma from One Piece. This was an easy one to theme because bubbles are just spheres and its easy to make soft round shapes feel like a good guy. I also considered a bat character with a supersonic voice power. I don't usually make non-human characters so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to consider branching out for something a little more out of my ball park and the power itself was pretty simple. I considered a more complicated power- a la converting and manipulating matter. Similar to a combination of Avatar: the Last Airbender and Full Metal Alchemist but I had a hard time pinning down a way to show that power in the character's design in a satisfying fashion. I really loved the portal creation character from the League of Villains from Boku no Hero and portals are one of those powers that has so much creative utility so I wanted to take a stab at that too. Lastly I considered a ghost themed character with a sort of protector-like-spirit that automatically defends the character.

And so I did some silhouette sketches for the ideas. I always have a tough time with generating TONS of ideas, so I usually settle on like 8 silhouettes and then I boil them down to three or four per idea.

From the silhouette point I consider what I'd like to make from the silhouettes I have and I make some more complete sketches of the characters so that I can get a better idea of what the character is going to really be.

It's usually at this point that I start aggressively trying to solicit feedback and thoughts from people who I trust. Not necessarily artists, but people who will tell me what they like and don't like.

Usually I'll get a combination of dramatic conceptual feedback and some more generic, "oh, yeah I like that" feedback, so Ill usually take another pass at the drawings, try and build in the more dramatic conceptual feedback to get a feel for it. Once that's done I just jam out a quick piece of concept art to work from to the best of my rather limited ability!

Once the concept art is done I switch into work mode and open up Ye Olde Zbrush to get my high poly done and really get the feel for how everything will work out in 3D.

Once the Zbrush high poly is at a point where I think it'll bake well I decimate it and bring it into Maya for retopology. I was aiming to stay below 50,000 tris for this project (for no particular reason).

When the topology is done, I lay the UVs out. For this I decided to have the grenades be on a separate texture sheet and with the rest of the character just on the one. Once the UVs are packed how I like 'em I do some test bakes in Marmoset, usually checking for any issues with my UVs. I'll adjust accordingly from there and bake everything out. I bake out a set of Normal/AO/Curvature/WorldSpace/Position maps.

Once thats all baked out I bring everything into Substance Painter and start texturing. I decided to go PBR with Portalgeist, but I'll use Substance Painter for painting out hand-painted stuff too.

With the textures baked out I test things out in Marmoset. Displaying is something I have the least experience with so I probably spent far too long playing with lights and poses and the like. I made a simple rig and such for some light posing.

And voila, the arduous process completed! I arrived at Portalgeist!

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