LogIn3D Artist Douglas Chaves shared a detailed breakdown explaining how to recreate Laufey's braided hairstyle from God of War Ragnarök using ZBrush and Maya's XGen.
Introduction
Hello everyone! First of all, it is a pleasure to be able to share with everyone a little of what I have learned over the years in this 3D area that inspires us so much. Thank you for the 80 Level opportunity!
My name is Douglas Chaves, I'm a 3D Lead Artist at Diorama Digital Studio, a Brazilian outsourcing company located in Recife, which provides services to several companies in the world, such as EA, Housemarque, Illfonic, Gearbox, and other fantastic studios. I have been working as a Character Artist, producing characters from stylized to realistic in indie and AAA titles.
The Artistic Path
I always liked to draw, unlike the other children who preferred, as you can imagine, playing football or having fun in the streets of the neighborhoods with the most diverse games. I used to spend hours and hours of the day drawing. At that time, my parents needed to go out to work and I was alone at home for part of the day. After arriving from school, I would put a cassette tape of Michael Jackson in an old mini system, take my A4 sheets and draw my dinosaurs. Over time, I moved on to manga drawing Saint Seiya’s characters, which was a very popular anime here in Brazil. That was most part of my childhood.
At the age of eighteen, in 2001, after finishing high school, I was a little lost, because I wanted to work with art, I just didn't know how. In Brazil at that time there were very few areas related to art and even fewer areas related to games.
So I went looking for my first job and ended up in a peculiar one. I had no previous experience, so after some rejections in art-related offers, I accepted the first job offer that came to me to pay for my studies, which was in the sewing area.
After a brief search with very little guidance, I’ve chosen the closest thing to what I would like to do, and that was available in the region. The Graphic Communication Design course, a technical course in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, is where I was born and raised. The course gave me excellent tools and artistic bases that help me until this day in what I do. That's when the doors began to open. With a lot of curiosity and willingness to learn, I used to spend my free time in the laboratory and library of this school, reading books and journals with more information about the 3D area.
After many internships and studies, I finally joined my first job in the gaming area, at Ilusis Interactive Graphics in 2011, where I was able to work on some Mobile games, titles for PS4, PS Vita, and Nintendo WiiU, that was my true “game college”. There I’ve had the opportunity to learn from talented and experienced people in the field and how to work with games.
Well, after this summary, let's get to the point. I've always loved video games, and I've always enjoyed creating characters in my drawings, bringing them to life. It felt good to draw dinosaurs because I’ve always imagined what they would look like, how they behaved, how they walked, what color they were etc. This exercised my creative side a lot, and now I can see the importance of creating conceptualized characters. Over time I’ve specialized and learned how to apply different techniques in production, a very difficult and competitive area, with wonderful artists working in it. Every day we learn new things and it takes time and dedication to develop our artistic view and do nice jobs.
To produce characters throughout my career I have used diverse software and methodologies, and I have learned new tools to provide what I needed at each time. Speaking of 3D tools, I started with 3ds Max, that's where I learned the fundamentals I needed. Over time, I studied new tools. As I was always curious about the whole character development process such as modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation, and Maya had a package of more interesting tools, I learned it and have been using it ever since. For my current character development workflow I’ve used the following software: ZBrush for high poly modeling, Maya for low poly modeling, retopology, and UVs, and Substance 3D Painter for texturing.
As Maya offers several resources, I use XGen for the development of hyper-realistic hair as it has a range of tools for Hair Strand development. As the advancement of the game industry has increasingly turned toward realistic finishing, I have decided to learn and specialize as a Groom Artist, which is a branch of character modeling. This area has a high demand and needs qualified artists.
I often have study projects in this area, which brought me here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the process I used to create this hairstyle for a concept based on the original character Faye (Laufey) from the God of War Ragnarök universe.
This project that I'm developing in my free time for tools studying, is still not fully finished. As a big fan of the GOW franchise, I love the characters and the graphic art style of Santa Monica Studios, and that was my inspiration to start this project. The objective of this project is to develop a hyper-realistic Faye with output for real-time rendering using resources from Unreal Engine 5, especially the hair groom.
Gathering References
Initially, I collected various references for the character, such as concepts, screenshots captured from the game, and photographs of the actress to develop the likeness. I use PureRef to organize my references.
Deborah Ann Woll's images used for the sculpture phase.
So I made a compilation of references to study the shape and anatomy of the hair. What made my job "easier" was having as a reference the excellent finished work of Amanda Irani, which provided me with a helpful guide to the shape, volume, and silhouette of Faye's hair.
ZBrush Workflow
After collecting and studying the concept, I made some blocks and quick studies in ZBrush so that I could better understand the behavior, shape, and anatomy of the hair. This brief study is important so that we don't waste time adjusting the base guides in XGen.
After this ZBrush study, I imported the block to Maya starting the preparation phase to work with XGen.
Working in XGen
As the base is ready, I started the Setting Project in Maya. It is a very important step so that all the references created by XGen are inserted and saved within the location defined for the project and everything will be saved in its proper folder called “xgen”.
By setting the project this way, XGen will only create the necessary folders as you progress through hair styling, making the project “cleaner” without adding folders that are not necessary.
When the file is ready and saved, start inserting the guides in the head modeling. For that, I already had a properly mapped head model and used it for inserting the guides. Remember that in general, we cannot use a scalp separated from the head because the mesh needs to be the same used for hair modeling, optimizing the amount of topology that will be implemented in the engine in the future. For other processes, it is common to create a mesh (scalp) just to associate with the groom.
Now we can work properly with XGen, painting the density masks among others, and helping finish the hair.
I created a density mask and from it, I could position the Descriptions and the threads’ insertions in the correct place on the scalp. This mask is one of the most important parts because it delimits where we insert the guides correctly in the head. Basically black where the strand does not “come out” and white where the strand “comes out”.
For this project, I’ve painted dozens of masks that helped in the distribution and performance of the modifiers. Just over one hundred and thirty masks. Most of these masks were created during the process of positioning and treating the locks of hair.
For this hair I planned to work with a Collection and several Descriptions, in total there were twenty-three Descriptions.
And here's the plug-in I used for the task.
As this hair was planned to be modeled using several layers, I have set the modifiers that give hair’s characteristics in one of the strands and then duplicated the Descriptions already with some of the Base Modifiers applied so that I had less work doing it but maintaining consistency in the overall finish. I’ve added or removed parameters from modifiers only when necessary.
Two variations of Clumping, some Noise, and Cut. The modifiers are very intuitive, for more details I recommend reading the documentation that gives an excellent idea of how they work.
I repeated the process for all the braids and strands, creating a Description for each braid and strand.
To facilitate the process of styling the hair, I separated it into layers so I was able to individually adjust each strand and volume, creating different depths and overlapping the strands of hair leading to a more natural result.
Positioning the necessary amount of guides was the final result of the hairstyle.
Remember the base mesh? Using it, I adjusted the volumes and shapes adding more details where necessary.
Each hair styling has its specificities, so the parameters I used for the Modifiers may vary from Strand to Strand. And to add that icing on the cake I created Descriptions that add fine details like Flyways and Peach fuzz.
This was the final result of modeling in Maya, this is just a preview and does not match the quality and final rendering of the hair.
Conclusion
This project is still in progress and its purpose is to study and test my skills exercising the whole production process of a realistic character based on a predefined concept.
For references and studies, I recommend the following YouTube channels:
You can check out more of my works and contact me on ArtStation, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.