LogInIzzy Moura talked about his 3D recreation of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Jolyne, showing how the character’s facial wrinkles were sculpted and explaining how the anime/manga vibe was captured with a combination of texturing techniques and shaders.
Introduction
Hello, I’m Izzy, a 3D Character Artist from Brazil. As a child, I was very passionate about drawing and creating my own stories and characters. However, as I grew older, I stopped drawing as much as I used to. In my last year of high school, I couldn’t really relate to any career. The only path I wanted to follow was an artistic one.
I tried drawing again and studying concept art and illustration. Then I found out about sculpting 3D characters, and I felt like that was what I wanted to learn and work with. I fell in love with the whole process of making 3D models, rendering, retopology, texturing, animation, and compositing. Before the Jolyne project, I worked on some more realistically looking work for my portfolio. Also, around a year ago, I started working with 3D-printed statues and real-time characters for games.
Starting the Project
Three years ago, when I was just starting to learn the whole process of making a good 3D model, I really wanted to do a fanart of Jolyne Cujoh, who is my favorite character from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. At the time, I liked how the image turned out, but three years later I couldn’t even look at it. Nowadays, I think it’s terrible. That’s why three months ago, an idea of doing a fanart of the same character again and seeing how I improved came to my mind.
I wanted to do a more stylized character than I’m used to, so I took inspiration from some other artists: FHNT for sculpting face and body, Leslie Van den Broeck for animation, and this specific art by Enzo Fernandez for the overall vibe. Instead of following a specific concept, I took a pose from a frame of the anime and a drawing from another artist whose name, sadly, I don't remember. The expression I used was from one of J Hill's characters.
Sculpting
The sculpting process started with a standard ZBrush mannequin, from which I would inflate the head and body parts that needed more volume. After that, I’d block out the primary forms. The character’s back was an important part of this project, so I made sure to work on its shape.
After the blockout phase, I had a face with stylized proportions. It’s not what I’m used to working with. Thus, for the secondary forms, I used this sculpt as reference to give some life to the character. To achieve a more stylized look, I gave the primary and secondary planes on the face a sharp edge, whilst trying not to overdo it so the character doesn’t look too noisy. I did the same for the body and the clothes’ wrinkles.
The hair was an important part of this project. It’s an iconic look, so I didn’t want to mess it up. The reference for the hair is taken from Yuditya Afandi’s art. It caught my eye as its appearance had a lot of sharp edges, and flowy hair was exactly what I was looking for.
To achieve this look, I started to sculpt the hair strands with the standard brush, paying attention to the flow of the hair. I utilized the Geometry tab and then the Clay Polish tool. I only changed Maximum Curvature, Softness, and Sharpness values to get the sharp look. Also, I used the GIO brush from Pablo Munoz Gomez to deepen the hair stands and make it pop out more.
For the final look, I added some single hair strands to give a more realistic feel, going along and against the hair flow to make it look messy.
UVs and Texturing
I didn’t intend for this project to be ready for games or animation. I just wanted to focus on sculpture and texture, so I only decimated the meshes and opened the UVs on ZBrush.
To achieve the desired look on the final render, I used Substance 3D Painter for the texture and Blender for tweaking the shaders. It was a bit hard to achieve the stylized look on the skin the way I wanted. It looked too flat. I needed to find the right balance between stylized and realistic appearance. I didn’t want the skin to look like I procedurally generated the texture with smart materials and masks. Therefore, I painted the skin with standard Substance 3D Painter brushes to the point that you can even see some brush strokes.
The eye was made using the Tiny Eye add-on for Blender made by tinynocky.
Texturing clothes was very simple. I added a base color and then continued with a lighter green shade, color variations to render dirt and roughness of the texture, added a symbol that the character has on her clothes, and used a mask for webbing.
Texturing hair was easy too. I painted it using ZBrush and Blender. I also used the shader to make a stylistic look inspired by Mika Pikazo. On some of her artwork, mostly on the hair and clothes, you can see a secondary color detail. I think it looks nice, so I tried doing something similar in 3D using the Wave Texture node.
Rigging and Animation
I used the Human Meta Rig from Blender. I didn’t want to do anything fancy with it, and the Mesh was also not T-posed. After positioning the bones, Blender generated a rig that worked quite well for what I wanted.
VFX
Since the beginning of the project, I envisioned the character with a yellow and reddish orange aura around her. While looking for a way to do it, I found this video:
Using shaders and Geometry Nodes was intimidating at first, but after watching the video, this effect seemed simple to achieve, and I could manipulate it to achieve the desired look.
The effect consists of three planes behind the character modeled on the Geometry Nodes tab. All of them have a Raycast node which creates a mask of a body that moves in real-time on those planes. Subtracting the Position node on the Object info node allows the mask to stay consistent behind regardless of the camera position. The planes also have an object constraint, which makes them rotate in relation to the position of the camera’s original point.
The shader uses the mask to make a noise texture and give an outer part a transparent look with Color Ramp to vary the color.
Rendering
While setting up the lights, I realized that the aura behind her wasn’t enough to create the rim light effect I wanted, so I added some lights to help with that.
The background was made using Blender’s Compositor tool.
Conclusion
This was supposed to be a shorter project, but as time passed, I wanted to learn animation, then VFX and shaders on Blender. It ended up taking a month to finish. My biggest challenge was tweaking the colors to get the result I wanted, realizing that I needed to focus more on the color values to make the colors work together.
My advice to beginner artists is that if you are feeling that you are not progressing on your journey, always go back to the fundamentals. Structure, volume, form, and shapes should always be at the back of your mind while sculpting.