Creating a Stylized 3D Character of a Water Woman with Blender & Maya
Fabien Metais spoke about the creation process behind the Water Woman project, explaining how he modeled and sculpted the character in Maya without retopologizing, and detailing how he textured it by painting in black and white, then changing the entire color palette.
Introduction
Hi! My name is Fabien. I'm a French 3D Surfacing Artist. I've been passionate about 3D art for a long time. In 2019, I began attending a 3D animation school. During that time, I worked on a lot of projects like 3D/2D animation, 3D modeling, and texturing.
My goal is to work as a freelance Surfacing Artist for props and/or characters. I'm available right now for remote work. I'm interested in every part of 3D production, from modeling to compositing.
When I did my last character surfacing project, I realized that I am very passionate about texture and painting directly on 3D models! Here is my previous project. Between these two projects, I did a props surfacing project to continue to improve my skills in painting!
Water Woman
After that, I fell in love with an illustration from Candice Theuillon, who was an inspiration because she is a texture supervisor. Because of this amazing illustration, I had barely finished my previous project when I was already eager to start this one!
This illustration really inspired me! It felt like I could already see the 3D form within the illustration. So I just started to search for a lot of 3D references for the modeling and for the shape of the face from the front because I only had the side.
I was already used to working with references for animation, modeling, and lighting in Maya, so it wasn't complicated to follow the reference using PureRef and an image plane.
I like Maya because I prefer to do the modeling and the sculpting directly in the same software. So I didn't need to retopologize the model after that.
For me, it's much easier to unwrap UVs on a model that I created directly with box modeling because I can imagine where I'll cut the UVs from scratch.
It's funny because I only used basic tools from Substance 3D Painter. I just painted with Kyle's Ink brushes from Substance 3D Painter and that's it. I tried a new workflow for this project, which consists of painting every value in black and white and copying every layer with an anchor point to add color whenever I want.
I did that because I wanted a workflow that would let me create a stylized render like this one and change the colors whenever I want. My mindset was: "If a customer likes the painting effect but doesn't like the colors together and asks me to change every color, what can I do?"
So if I want, I can do the same render with the same woman, but it can be a lava woman instead!
I rendered in Blender because I can play with the shader editor directly on my character and the compositing editor to increase the quality and details, like the light halo, the grain on the character, or the chromatic aberration. I tried to reduce the shadow impact on the character to improve the 2D look.
Conclusion
This project took me two months because I had other work alongside it, and I preferred to take my time with this project because I had a lot of look dev and workflow ideas to clean up all my 3D scenes and be more professional in my career. For me, this project was a pleasure because I really appreciate painting on 3D models and adding a real artistic direction to 3D to make it look beautiful and something that can still be beautiful for the audience in the future.
As I said in my previous project, I made this project to see how much I can do and where my limits are. That's why this project is more ambitious than the previous one. I learned a lot of new skills in Substance 3D Painter and Blender. Now, I can't wait to show my next project after my look dev research!
I'm available for any commission or work as a 3D freelance texture/surfacing artist! Here is my demo reel link.
