Breakdown: How to Design a Scarecrow-Turned-Human Character

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Anna Cerutti, and I'm a 22-year-old Italian 3D Artist. I chose to enter this world as it combines two of my greatest passions: video games and sculpture. This passion was passed on to me during high school, where an excellent traditional sculpture teacher helped me discover a love for volumetric creation.

I've always loved the feeling of plastic arts, and 3D sculpting and modeling have connected that with my immense fascination for human and technological progress. In practical terms, I attended an art high school where I studied figurative art and graphics. Afterward, I chose an academy focused on video game 3D modeling, a three-year program I recently completed, earning an advanced certificate in video game 3D art.

Harvey

First and foremost, Harvey was a person with a story, someone interesting. Let me elaborate: our last academy project required us to develop a real-time medieval character, and one of our teachers gave us a great but underrated tip for the creation of a small project as an end in itself: there must be a short written story at the beginning to get attached to the character, and only then will it be possible to create a persuasive design and start the actual production.

Thus, I imagined a fantasy kingdom where the beloved emperor is a skilled wizard with the power of creation. One day, the kingdom comes under enemy attack, and the emperor uses his sorcery to give life to inanimate objects, especially scarecrows, in order to swell the army's depleted ranks. And that's how Harvey was born: a scarecrow dressed in old fabric leftovers and what remained of a jester's costume, equipped with pieces of armor. Even though she was created for this purpose, as soon as she came to life, she began to hate fighting and bloody wars.

Design

Inspired by the story, I started the design phase. I've always been fascinated by the stunning capacity of hyper-realistic reproductions, but being strongly influenced by East Asian pop culture, I have always leaned towards the art of simplification and exaggeration. So, I put these things together and attempted to create a character with cartoonish proportions but a realistic appearance. Additionally, the reflective and mysterious effect of mixed elements has always appealed to me, whether in surrealist art or in entertainment products such as "Omori" or "ENA: Dream BBQ."

I chose the name Harvey both to relate her to fields (because of her scarecrow nature) and because this subject was particularly suitable for expressing the art of not having to choose. I love a lot of different things that apparently are difficult to make coexist. Just as I've tried to merge stylization and realism, I also attempted to blend softness and restlessness. Thus, I created a girl with a tender face but dressed in old, ripped clothes; I chose an almost completely dark color palette, but enriched with bright hues and a Halloween-like look.

I've always been unsettled about making choices, but by taking advantage of the scarecrow's patchwork nature, what I wanted to do with this project was to not have to choose at all and instead make everything coexist. In this sense, Harvey is my collection, my "harvest" of the things I am fond of.

Workflow

My workflow starts by simplifying figures and sketching out all the necessary components; this allows me to see whether the design and silhouettes are readable and compelling and to gauge the project's scope. I started working on the face first, using generic anatomical references to create a solid base for the deformation process while preserving structural integrity and credibility. In this project, the eyes played a key role; I decided to give her large, brilliant, dreamy eyes.

This makes it easy to capture the viewer's gaze and encourage them to "read" her story: the little storytelling hint lies in the pupils, which are distorted into an X shape. Evoking button stitching, this detail suggests the scarecrow's metamorphosis, silently whispering Harvey's story to the viewer without the need for words.

To achieve a realistic result despite this unusual shape, I took a high-resolution scan of an iris, modified it to turn the pupil into a cross, and used grayscale to generate an alpha map. This served as a starting point for convincingly sculpting the eyes and speeding up production.

Moving on to hair creation, I used Maya's GS Curve plug-in. Since I couldn't find reference material for the specific hairstyle I had in mind, I experimented on a friend. I did my best to style her hair, and I took plenty of reference photos, focusing mainly on the scalp (the most complex part) to study the direction and curvature of the hair strands from the roots. Based on the directions I observed, I arranged some hair cards all around the head as guides and then patiently duplicated and adjusted them.

For the braids, I simply created curves following the weave of the strands and used the Sweep Mesh tool. Finally, I enhanced the hairstyle with individual hair cards to add dynamism and realism. Since this was my first time using the hair card method, the workflow was quite time-consuming, but also very rewarding and educational; in fact, I ended up using the same plug-in to create the fur on the boots and to arrange the feathers on the skirt as well.

Switching to clothing, I first created simple paper patterns in Marvelous Designer, and by adjusting the dimensions and pressure, I achieved the structure and folds I wanted. Using the UVs exported directly from Marvelous, together with detail masking, I applied alpha patterns to a sculpt layer, followed by a thin woven noise texture for added detail. Finally, I used a brush to paint small stitches along the UV seams to disguise them.

The cartoonish proportions are most evident in the facial features and body shape, but I tried to create a cohesive look by adding specific details. For instance, alongside standard stitching, I incorporated some oversized stitches resembling staples (on the boots) or cords (on the collar).

Moving on to the technical aspect, I manually created a mid-poly mesh of about 60k polygons (excluding the hair and other cards) in Autodesk Maya. I started by exporting the hard-surface pieces from ZBrush, which I had previously created with a clean topology, and I used the Quad Draw tool to create the main loops at first.

Then, I covered the more delicate structures (such as the clothing folds), and finally connected the pieces, trying to keep as few parts separate as possible to facilitate posing or future animations. Thanks to the key loops, the unwrapping stage was very straightforward and quick. Finally, I divided the UVs by material and manually arranged the shells to make the most of the available UV space.

Texturing

I worked on the textures mainly using Substance 3D Painter's features. For the textures of inanimate objects, such as clothing and armor, my initial workflow is quite similar: I always start with a long list of procedural layers, where I try to make use of every type of generator and bake map to quickly and easily obtain a base with rich color variation. Once I reach a result I'm satisfied with, I start manually creating masks to add more color variations and enrich the design.

With the same goal, I used a mask obtained from the stylization of a jute sack to fray the clothing, and then I applied a skin material inside the small holes. In general, if I have to work on large surfaces, I split them into several sections to treat them separately with additional patterns and details. I often joke about this, saying I have a bit of the horror vacui thing. To save time, I try to reuse everything I already have.

For example, the skin texture is a classic hand-painted dermis layer laid over the various colored layers of muscles and bones. I think the interesting part is that, for the SSS mask, I started with a high-contrast, inverted version of the dermis layer. This way, I already had a detailed indication of the thinnest parts of the skin, to which I then added thickness values.

What I wanted to create with the hair was a voluminous and intricate hairstyle, difficult to identify as either realistic or cartoonish, in order to blend with the rest of the character. After arranging the hair cards, I transferred a sphere's normals onto the hair to soften the effect of the planes as much as possible and increase their believability. Then, I created a scattering mask and applied it as a thin surface in Marmoset Toolbag to highlight just a few strands and restore a bit of the painterly effect.

Speaking of Marmoset Toolbag, I created the feather material almost entirely in this program. I started by creating a simple albedo in Substance to use as a base. After that, I used custom influence and directional maps to add complexity to the material, inserting them into the dedicated sheen, scattering, anisotropy, and specular slots. I then created copies with hue adjustments to vary the appearance of the feathers based on their position on the skirt.

Rendering

As you can imagine, I used Marmoset Toolbag for rendering. I decided to use the well-known lighting of Rembrandt's portraits, a scheme that creates contrast and makes volumes easily distinguishable. It is typically described as dramatic, but personally, I would rather define it as poetic, since it produces a fascinating and mysterious effect. Therefore, my main light source had to be situated at about 45 degrees to the horizontal plane, inclined downward and a few inches above eye level.

This way, one half of the face is completely illuminated, while the other is almost completely in shadow. What characterizes this technique is the particular way the light interacts with facial features: with this scheme, the shadow cast by the nose cuts through the light on the more shaded half, forming a small triangle of light just below the eye. It's a constructed scheme that nevertheless feels natural.

To reduce the contrast and achieve a better presentation, I used a fill light mirrored with the main one, and finally, I used a rim light to separate the subject from the background and make her silhouette more readable. Once the images were rendered, I used Photoshop's Camera Raw to adjust the values and fix small areas of pure white and absolute black. Finally, I balanced the colors, using chromatic contrast, to compensate for the contrast lost in the light values.

Conclusion

Summing up, I think the most complex part is making everything work together. Our eyes are so used to looking at other people that they become extremely critical and perfectionistic when viewing human subjects. That's why I'd recommend trying to create a character, even if you don't intend to specialize in this category. It teaches you a lot; it's a topic that won't let you settle for "good enough" and forces you to do extensive research.

With a solid sculpt, a bit of patience, and the right knowledge, creating convincing textures isn't difficult at all, and rendering simply becomes a tool to improve the work with well-thought-out lights and setups. Producing a good sculpt certainly requires plenty of references; to create something engaging based on your own imagination, you first need to understand and be able to replicate the fundamentals. This applies to everything: to make a cartoon model convincing, you need a clear idea of what it would look like in reality. So, you can play with proportions while retaining the key features that the human eye relies on.

The final challenge is making what you're creating convincing, whether it's realistic or stylized, scientifically based or fantasy. Here's an example: did you know that arms aren't just generic tools aimed at moving objects? Their length, elbow flexibility, hand supination, and the neural circuits controlling them all evolved and were refined primarily to bring objects to the mouth.

That's why an oversized hand doesn't look particularly jarring, whereas disproportionate arms do. The key is to study the structure and the role of what you're creating and avoid compromising its primary functions. Only then can beauty emerge naturally, because something is truly beautiful when it is, first and foremost, true to its purpose.

Anna Cerutti, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins