Breakdown: Recreating Zeri from League of Legends in 3D

Introduction 

Hey everyone, my name is Hemant Kunj, and I am a 3D Character Artist from Austria. I have always been amazed by 3D, be it in movies, games, or even ads. During Covid, I dabbled a little in 3D, doing a Blender donut before I went back to studying engineering.

It was always in the back of my mind, and I always questioned if engineering is really what I want to do. At some point, I just could not hold back the urge and decided to pursue my career in 3D. At first, I was all over the place, but I quickly learned that if I wanted to make it in the industry, I would need to specialize and get really good at it. For me, it has always been character art more than anything.

I did roughly 6 months of self-study before I enrolled in Think Tank Online in February 2023 and specialised in Characters and Creatures for Movies.

Zeri, the Spark of Zaun

The first important step in any project is always gathering references and blocking out the character. When collecting references, you want material for every stage of the process – modeling, texturing, lookdev, and lighting. You also want references that reflect the level of quality you want to achieve and include work that inspires you.

You want to look at other people’s work and figure out how they solved some issues. For me, it was how to give a character big eyes without making them look like an alien. Since 2D concepts do not seamlessly work in 3D, it is important to make a rough blockout of everything. This is where you figure out the basic shapes and volumes, be very loose with your blockout and do not focus on details or topology.

Face & Head

I started with a base mesh, and since Zeri is a character from League of Legends, I took the proportions of the in-game model and applied them to my character. For that, I used the basic masking tools inside ZBrush with the Transpose Gizmo.

The face was a long back-and-forth. Since I was not using anyone's likeness, I was trying to figure out how to match the vibe of the concept. For that, I looked for game and cinematic characters. Learning how other artists solved the issue of making semi-realistic characters.

Even though girls have smooth skin, it is still important to have plane changes and think about the underlying structure of the skull, muscles, and fat. There is no easy way to learn this but looking at a lot of references and trying to understand how those shapes work. For that, I recommend that you start doing very early test renders. Set up the most basic Marmoset Toolbag scene with studio lighting and check if your model works. If you can, get other people whom you trust to look at your work.

Clothes & Gun

For the gun, I used Zeri’s concept art, which had the gun from all views. I took those into Maya and attached them to the corresponding camera. After that, it was simple box modelling while following the concept. For the curved surfaces, I used a Blinn shader and a lot of “Edit Edge Flow” to get it perfectly smooth.

The clothes were all done in Marvelous Designer, and the biggest tip for everyone on how to make digital drapery is to learn how actual clothes are made and what sewing patterns look like. Once you understand that, it is only a matter of learning about a few tools inside the software, and you can create anything you want. Once you have a fairly basic blockout of your garments, apply proper materials and particle distance to the clothes, as that will change the results of the simulation drastically.

The most difficult piece of clothing was definitely the coat, where I actually did a blockout first in ZBrush and then created sewing patterns with the UVs of that mesh inside of Marvelous Designer. To lift it off my character, I used slight pressure on the garment. That workflow is well explained in The Character Art of Horizon Zero Dawn with Guerrilla Games. This video also covers how to start sculpting your clothes and overcome the blank screen syndrome. 

Before I bring my Marvelous Designer simulations inside of ZBrush, I do a proper retopology inside of Marvelous Designer, giving me a good base to start sculpting. That can be used later for your low poly. Once I was in ZBrush, it was time to look for more references so I could know what kind of folds I would like to add on top of the simulated ones. I grabbed some puckering brushes and made sure to integrate them into my sculpt. Make sure that your garment already feels like cloth before you proceed with the next steps.

Retopology & Unwrapping

For retopology, I first decimated my models inside ZBrush so I could import them into Maya to use the Quad Draw tool. If you have double-sided pieces that are thin, I suggest actually splitting up those models into inner and outer parts because sometimes Quad Draw might snap to the surface on the other side of the mesh.

Since I had very good topology on all my pieces, I used the Subdivision Level 1 from my pieces as the base for the retopology. I reduced the edges where I could and added more to improve the silhouette. The most important part is that it holds the silhouette from all angles. After that, I brought the low poly into RizomUV to do my UVs. As I try to learn something new with every single project, I used this one to learn how to use RizomUV. From there, I went to Marmoset Toolbag to bake my mesh maps and brought those into Substance 3D Painter. Overall, I suggest watching Jared Chavez's free course as he beautifully covers the whole game pipeline:

Texturing

First, I always split up my different materials and objects into different folders inside Substance 3D Painter, mostly utilizing the ID map.

Skin

For the skin, I used the texture maps that were provided with my base mesh and the Texturing XYZ textures that I wrapped around my sculpted mesh and transferred the texture inside Faceform Wrap. I brought them into Substance 3D Painter and used a color correct filter to adjust the skin colors until they matched my desired skin tone.

For the transition, I blended them together with a mask. Since the scans are not perfect or sometimes do not even align with your sculpt, I put a paint layer on top and painted out blemishes or anything else unwanted. Since I didn't want her to have a lot of makeup, I left her mostly natural and adjusted most of it in the MetaHuman shader inside Unreal.

I multiplied a little bit of a dark red into my cavities to emulate some subsurface. The Texturing XYZ scans come with ID masks that can be used to isolate certain parts of the face, and even have some makeup masks that you can use. After this, most of the work is just looking at references and trying to match your desired skin.

Base Set of Layers for the Props

• Base Material Layer
• Soft Curvature Layer – Lifting up the hills
• Sharp Curvature Layer – Lifting up the edges
• AO Layer – Adding slight darkness to the crevices
• Moldy Paper Layer – Color variation

These layers are supposed to be used subtly and show off all the sculpted detail that you poured hours into making. After that, I usually take a picture of moldy paper or any texture that has some good natural color variation and put it on a layer (color channel) with the projection method set to tri-planar and apply it across my whole model. I usually set it to “Overlay” and decrease the opacity of the layer until I have good color variation across my model. Make sure to mask out spots that are not looking good.

Final Presentation

Metapipe is a great tool for turning your custom character into MetaHuman. The developers have a lot of videos on their channels on how to use their software. Keep in mind that you will still need plenty of patience with it and that it only rigs your body. It took me a few tries until I had a satisfactory result. MetaHumans come with their own shaders that you can reuse for your own character (face, body, eyes, hair, etc.)

It took a little while to get everything working, but all the effort was worth it, the second I saw my character talking. It is such an exhilarating feeling once the character you have been working on for months is finally coming alive.

For the clothes, I transferred the weights from the body to the clothing and adjusted the skin weights after, which worked surprisingly well.

The animation was exported from the MetaHuman sample project and applied to my own rig. I had to tweak a few keyframes, but overall, it worked right out of the box. It is also surprisingly easy to use animations from different sources. Just retarget them and blend them together with Unreal Engine's Animation Layer system.

Lighting & Rendering

For the character lighting, I mostly followed this article. It is a 3-point light setup with a top and bounce light, with an additional key light to give an extra highlight.

For the scene lighting, I was mostly trying to get a similar mood as the concept, building a small alley with Megascans assets and using the windows and some lamps as a light source to light my scene. Most of my lights are rect lights and a few spot lights.

I kept the rendering simple in the end. I used William Faucher’s render settings and rendered it through the Movie Render Queue. Since I wanted more control over all the post-process effects, I had Unreal generate render passes (AOV) and render layers, so I could add them later in Nuke. I ended up using Depth of Field, Chromatic Aberration, Haze, Vignette, Lens Aberration, and Film Grain.

Conclusion

This whole project took me roughly 6 months as I was learning the whole real-time pipeline and Unreal Engine for cinematics. The most rewarding moment in this whole journey was when Zeri started talking and the whole rig worked.

The biggest challenge was definitely getting the rig for the clothes working and everything inside Unreal, as you need to really dig through a lot of resources to find your answers.

The most difficult part about translating a stylized concept into a realistic character is learning that you need to understand the story and vibe of the character because you will not be able to translate all the proportions exactly into 3D. A good example is the eyes. In many concepts, you have all those characters with big eyes, which usually does not work for realistic characters. I had to find the sweet spot of making the eyes big enough without breaking the realism. For that, it is always important to have a good blockout with all the elements to check if the concept can work in 3D and what needs to be adjusted.

Hemant Kunj, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford