Creating Arcane's Vi Based on 2D Concept with ZBrush, Maya, Substance 3D, & Marmoset

Introduction

My name is Alexandre Mougenot, and I have been a 3D Character Artist for five years. I quickly turned to character art because I find it one of the best ways to convey emotions to viewers. I love telling stories and, above all, highlighting a character's past.

I worked mainly at TAT Production for four years, first on the feature film Jungle Bunch 2, then on the series Astérix The Big Fight for Netflix, and most recently on the upcoming feature film Lovebirds as Lead.

I also worked at Illogic Studio, this time as Character Modelling Supervisor, on the Intermarché - Unloved advert. And very recently, I finished my contract on a video game project at Supamonks Studio in Paris.

Vi Project

I found Meybis Ruiz Cruz's design on Instagram and loved the shapes she gave Vi. Being a fan of the Arcane series, I thought that recreating one of the main characters would be a good challenge.

Painted textures are a graphic style that I am constantly trying to improve. The most challenging part of this project was painting all the lights by hand without them looking fake or poorly constructed. I tried to paint the SSS (Subsurface Scattering) and Ray Tracing directly into the texture as best I could in order to have better control over the final result. 

Modeling

For the face, I started with a base mesh that I developed during various projects I worked on. This saves me valuable time, allowing me to focus more on the artistic aspect of the character. This base mesh is fully usable in production because I have already used it on projects that required facial animation.

For all the props and clothing, I always started with my base mesh and used Maya's QuadDraw tool to create a low poly. Once this step was complete, I adjusted the size and shape of the clothing by hand. I go back and forth a lot between ZBrush and Maya, as I feel more comfortable with Move's tools, especially the Alternative Smooth tool, which allows me to move on to the topology cleaning stage.

I highly recommend the alternative smooth to my students when they need to move on to this stage of cleaning, because, unlike the classic smooth, it preserves more volume. I generally reduce the intensity between 10% and 5% in order to better control my topology.

Topology and Texturing

For the face topology, I used a basemesh that I worked on throughout my projects.

I have to adapt it for each character, but it saves me a lot of time. It's the same for the UVs, but I still check the stretching of specific areas such as the nose, eyes, and mouth to avoid any issues in Substance 3D Painter.

The texture was the part that took me the most effort. I painted all the visible colours on the character from a new layer in Substance 3D Painter. I always apply a fill layer base with BaseColour, Roughness with a value of 0.85 to give the model a matte, 2D look, and Normals.

Then I apply a second color to the face, which serves as a light blocker, to clearly define what will be in shadow and what will be in light.

Little by little, I add layers to get closer to the initial concept. I always pay attention to the position of my layers when painting. It is important to avoid painting colours that are in shadow directly into the light, as this will give the texturing a strange appearance.

What I also do is paint strategic areas (mouth, eyes, etc.) and organise them into folders so that I never get lost in the whole thing. The eyes are not a complex part of texture, but there are principles to keep in mind to ensure they look realistic.

For this project and in order to stay true to the design, I tried to keep things simple and refer to what had been done in stylized films such as Arcane and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I really like the imperfect look of Miles' eyes, as it gives a more graphic rendering that is closer to the comics.

When creating my textures, I started with black outlines around the edge of the iris (1), then added a dark blue/green color, slightly desaturated so that it wouldn't overwhelm the rest of the eye (2). Then I added a lighter area to simulate the contact of light on the iris (3), followed by the pupil in almost pure black (4), and finally white dots to suggest the wet effect of the cornea (5).

This gives the eyes more life and depth. And to avoid a flat rendering of the entire eye, I painted a shadow on the upper part, under the eyelid, to maintain consistency of light across the entire face.

The hair part was both fun and time-consuming to set up. I used a brush that applies a model with the help of a Curve that you apply to your head in ZBrush. This brush allows you to generate one strand of hair after another. Once I had applied the first layer of hair, I split it from the head, as this operation merges everything, and I created different polygroups.

I worked on these strands of hair in layers, starting from the top and working my way down. 

The advantage is that the topology is already usable as is, so there is no need to go back over it to redo it. 

I had to go back over everything in Maya to create UVs and, above all, arrange them in the same direction one by one to better manage the textures that I could potentially project in Substance 3D Painter.

Lighting & Rendering

To preserve this very 2D look, and to avoid going against the lighting I painted in Substance 3D Painter, I first applied a white HDRI in Arnold to check that my textures were working as well as possible. 

After several tests, I decided it would be a shame not to keep the blue rim light that was created in the concept directly in Lighting. But once added, I felt that my light was reacting in a very mundane way, and I was missing that stylised touch.

I went back to Substance 3D Painter and painted my normal maps to give a more stylised look when the light illuminated my model. 

I've been experimenting with Marmoset Toolbag 5 for a while now, and I wanted to test its real-time system to see if it could support this stylisation system. 

I especially wanted to make short presentation videos for my social media, but mainly for my showreel. Marmoset was very well suited to my project, especially in terms of the quality I got with Arnold. 

The advantage with Marmoset is that you can do a little bit of post-processing directly in the software (add DOF, Bloom, chromatic aberration, etc.), so I didn't have to edit anything after exporting from the software. 

Conclusion

I think the most challenging thing at first is to preserve the essence of the design. Meybis has her own very strong style, and it would be a shame to stray from it. The second challenge was the textures and hand-painted lighting. We had to give it a 2D look, but also make it seem as if there were light sources touching the character. 

This kind of exercise is really interesting, as it helps you find tools to save time while staying as faithful as possible to the character. I see it as an exercise in analysis, understanding how the artist thought about their design to make it appealing. 

I always advise people who are just starting out to take the time to analyse, research, and, above all, experiment with different methods. There is no single way to create characters, but you have to find your own way of doing things and, above all, the one that best suits the project you are working on. Above all, don't forget to have fun and enjoy creating. 

Alexandre Mougenot, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine