Artist Shows How to Model & Texture Dr. Alex Yu from Prey in His Style

Introduction

Hey guys! I want to start by saying how grateful I am for this opportunity to present myself and walk you through my workflow for the “Alex Yu” project. My name is Gabriel Lopes de Menezes, I’m a 26-year-old artist from Brazil and I have been a 3D artist for about 8 years.

My career started in 2016 when I started working as a 3D Generalist at a small animation company in Brazil. After that, I worked for Wildlife Studios and Share Creators, the latter is where I first led a team of artists and created characters for Rise of Kingdoms and PUBG. More recently, I had the pleasure of working together with Superseed as a Character Artist for Hearthstone. Today, I work as a Character Artist at Roarty Digital on the Fortnite project.

Alex Yu

In 2023, I decided to leave my job, which focused on cinematic characters, to pursue a career with real-time characters. I believe Cedric Pervynway is one of the best artists in the industry today, and I have admired his work for a long time now. So, my first instinct was to develop a real-time character based on one of his concept art. However, I dragged this project for over a year as my skill level was not sufficient when I first started it. I had to do a bunch of other characters and studies in order to achieve the quality level I intended for this project. My goal was to create a cinematic-level game character using a complete industry-level pipeline, but during that time, I completed other projects and ended up working with real-time characters on a daily basis.

From that moment on, I decided to loosen up on my process and just have some fun with this amazing character, even if that meant not following 100% of the concept art and using high-poly meshes and grooms straight out of XGen.

Cedric's work has been translated for 3D countless times – from Dishonored to its cinematics and a bunch of personal work from great artists. My main references were the translations from JoeL (he did two interpretations of Cedric's design and both looked amazing) and the concept art/game art from Prey. Arkane Studios's work in general was also an amazing stylistic reference. My reference board contains projects with similar looks, Arkane games, and material references (similar clothing, metals, etc).

One particular thing I always have on my ref board is progress on my piece, from super initial renders to what I have at the moment; this helps me to see how far the project’s come and motivates me to keep going.

Modeling

I started by trying to achieve likeness with the concept and for his face; it worked beautifully, the shapes translated in an awesome way to the sculpt, but not so much for his body. I had the feeling he needed something bigger.

The character that I was aiming to do was bulkier, so I created an underlying fatter anatomy and rebuilt his outfit over it. I also realized that the outfit design in the game was much more detailed than the concept, so I used parts of it to add more information to the design.

When I was happy with the overall design, I used the ZRemesher and Unwrap tools in ZBrush to complete the technical steps of the process as quickly as possible. My goal was no longer to create a production-ready character but to explore the possibilities of real-time looks.

Skin

I tested different workflows for his skin. The first one was to bring this information from scan data, so I used the ZWrap workflow, but the result didn’t feel right. I wanted something dirtier and intentional, so I used the scan only as a super soft base, just to get the direction of the pores and creases, and built on top of it by hand sculpting and layered alphas. Some of the tools I used were the Gio brush (for the creases and lines,) the skin detailing brushes from J Hill (these were super helpful in adding variation to the pores), and some overall noise layering.


Grooming

My initial intention was to groom this bust with haircards, but I am much more familiar with XGen grooming. Now, with Unreal Engine and Marmoset Toolbag being able to support XGen splines, I chose to test them, and I was very surprised with the quality. For this project, I still used Marmoset Toolbag 4, which doesn't support XGen splines, so you have to work around that.
Here are the different descriptions and each of their guide work:


Before turning your XGen groom into geometry, make sure to uncheck the face camera option – this will make it look off on Maya, but the look on Marmoset will be correct:

Then convert your groom to geometry but be sure to check the highlighted options, this will divide the strands' geometry into a 4x4 UV stack, this way, we will be able to paint a color variation map for them.

Texturing

My goal was to get an old and grungy look for his outfit but still make it slightly stylized. I tried different materials for it, but ultimately what worked was creating my own materials from the ground up. I focused on telling a story with his textures to enhance its design instead of only translating it. This is where the "daddy" detail came from. Here are some close-ups of these materials with neutral lighting.

Lighting

The project is composed of different renders. Most of them were made using a single HDRI, mainly to test the lookdev, but for my beauty renders, I added a ton of different lights to try and translate the lighting of the concept, more dimensional and cinematic lighting. Here’s the breakdown for my key lighting:



• HDRI: I like to have my HDRI set to be very dim, just for some initial volumes and some reflection on the metallic areas.

• Rim lights: I wanted to outline the entire character, so I used numerous small lights to achieve this look – bigger ones were causing artifacts and a lack of control of some areas.


• Metal bounces and eyes: this is a polishing pass on the lights. I tend to place smaller lights on areas that are looking a bit dull to create some appealing reflections. Here, I did it mainly for the metals and his eyes.

• Key Light: this is my isolated key light. I think I moved it and tweaked its properties until the last second. The most important fact about it is that it is a spot light, and it has a very soft spot angle, making the light brighter on his face and much dimmer on the bottom.


Conclusion

The main thing I want to take out of this project is the value of making smaller projects and studies in order to get better at the fundamentals and “fail faster.” I have worked on and off this character for more than a year, and over this time, I restarted the entire project a couple of times due to not having the necessary skills to achieve the look I wanted.

So if I may give a piece of advice for any student character artists out there, work on your fundamentals before trying to bring a concept to life: anatomy, cloth folds, texturing, design, basic topology, and UV layout. After you have a good base on those, you will be able to work on any concept, whether stylized or realistic.

Also, persist in your projects, finish them no matter what. It’s better to change your goal with it or to find new directions within the same project than to just put it away. The knowledge and experience come from the moments you find yourself not knowing what to do next or how to achieve a specific result.

During this project, I found myself extremely frustrated and eager to abandon it, but now, seeing the result I was able to achieve and how much I learned along the way, I am very happy that I stuck with it.
  

All things said, I learned so much working on this, and it really set my mind to working only on real-time engines such as Marmoset and Unreal. The final renders took me about 3 minutes each – if I were working on an offline render, it could’ve been easily up to a day per frame. I have an entire background working with V-Ray and Arnold, but the quality and speed of Marmoset and Unreal today are unmatched.
  

My next project will be out soon, this time focusing on the fundamentals of cloth, sculpting, and simulation with Marvelous Designer, so stay tuned!


Gabriel Lopes de Menezes, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine