Apex Legends' Wattson Recreated Arcane-Style

CG Generalist and 3D Character Artist Tim Brown Lees has unveiled a fantastic portrait that merges two great universes together. The artist has managed to recreate Apex Legends' Natalie “Wattson” Paquette in an unusual, Arcane-like style. The stylized portrait was made in Maya, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Blackmagic Fusion, and XGen.

The author has also explained several techniques behind the project. To set up the beautiful stylized hairstyle, Tim set the hair width in XGen quite high and used an AiToon Shader to get no shadows. Then, the artist layered an Ambient Occlusion shader on top of that to get a little lighting info.

To get the lighting just right, Tim did a Direct Lighting pass and overlaid that around 50% with the Albedo pass, and then a Shadow pass on top of that. Then, a separate pass for Rimlights with a Gradient Map adjustment was used to get the required cartoony look.

Besides being a fantastic Character Artist, Tim Brown Lees is also a CG master with several amazing projects in his portfolio. Some of you may already know Tim for collaborating with Valve to help them produce several trailers for their Dota 2 game. The artist worked on the Nemestice trailer, Diretide 2020 trailer, and more. You can check them out by visiting Tim's ArtStation page.

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