LogInTomasz Zarucki talked to us about the Toad project, discussing modeling and texturing a realistic toad and animating a vocal sac using Blender and Substance 3D Painter.
Introduction
My name is Tomasz Zarucki. I come from Poland and work as a freelance Concept artist in the video game industry. As a child, I was very interested in visual effects and video game development. I have been drawing monsters for as long as I can remember. When I was about 15, I was reading video game magazines and realized there was a dream job called Concept Artist. I bought my first graphic tablet the same year and started learning digital painting in Photoshop.
I started learning 3d in 2012 and did my first experiments with Blender as a tool to make a 3D base for overpainting. I get a lot of satisfaction from learning new techniques and widening my skill set, so I try to challenge myself and test new ways to create with each project I commit to. During my concept art career, I worked on projects like Guild Wars 2, Evil West, and Nobody Wants To Die. Also, I did a few illustrations for book covers and Magic the Gathering card illustrations.
Getting Started
One day, I wanted to see how far I could push sculpting in Blender in terms of details and resolution. I wanted to sculpt some rough and bumpy surfaces, so I decided to sculpt a Toad. That's how this project started: as a late-night sculpting session. I went with a slightly stylized approach because I wanted to make sure that the toad was really chunky and grumpy.
Modeling & Texturing
Toad was sculpted from a sphere with Dyntopo enabled. The initial sculpt was retopologized using the QuadRemesher add-on. After that, I subdivided the mesh with the Multires modifier. I continued to fix proportions and add skin details with alpha brushes.
After I was done sculpting, I shrink-wrapped the low-poly model onto high-poly and exported both to Substance 3D Painter, where I painted all textures. I used automatic UVs made by Painter. At that stage, it was still a sculpting and texturing exercise. The decision to animate the creature appeared after.
After I was done texturing the toad, I modeled the base mesh of the stork legs. I used a technique based on the Solidify modifier and extruded edges. After the base was modeled, I used QuadRemesher again and continued detail sculpting with the Multires modifier. I manually unwrapped UVs in Blender. The stork legs textures are made with the same material as the toad, with adjusted colors and shifted hues. Reusing that material speeded up the whole process and gave me satisfying results.
Animating the Character
The toad is animated mostly by a simple skeleton with IK animation and a few keyframed shape keys, which are responsible for animating movements like breathing, eye blinking, and heartbeat.
I've made vocal sack animation with blend shapes and a keyframed shader mask. The translucent skin when the sack is stretched is achieved with a duplicated skin shader with displacement turned off and with more translucency and procedural veins added on top. The mask is a Height Map mixed with a spherical gradient mapped to an empty object that is parented to one of the bones in the head of a toad.
Since I was exporting renders in .exr to DaVinci Resolve, I did only some of the processing inside Blender, mostly because of the limitations of the Resolve free version that does not offer sharpening or Lens Distortion.
Lighting & Post-Production
The light setup is simple: an HDRI, a sun lamp, and an area lamp, adding a bit of cold backlight. There is also spot light adding a tiny specular reflection to the toad's eye and another spot light on the other side with the constraint "track to" and a light linking group containing only the "fly" model to help with its readability during animation.
The environment is assembled with assets from Poly Haven. The mud shader is made with free materials from the BlenderKit add-on. The water shader is custom-made for this scene.
Conclusion
To sum up, the time required to complete this project would be around 4-5 weeks, working in the evenings after the day job.
The biggest lesson was to use different scenes in the blend file to work on different parts of the project and then instance collections in the main scene where I put everything together. That way, Blender performs very well and is easy to navigate.