Creating Baby Yoda from The Mandalorian in 3D

Introduction

Greetings, art community! My name is Ivan Miya. I am a character artist who has been making contributions to the video games space since 2005. I have been fortunate enough to work at studios like Midway Games, WayForward, DICE, and most currently, Sony Interactive Entertainment – the Visual Arts division. Some franchise titles I have contributed to include Mortal Kombat, Battlefield, and The Last of Us, among others.

As many of you reading this article are well aware, it is work that can be sometimes grueling, sometimes challenging, but many times rewarding. It's been a great journey pursuing my passions, working at inspiring workplaces alongside other like-minded character artists, collaborating with other disciplines, and successfully shipping projects.  

A little bit of my background. I was born in the former Yugoslavia, moved to Chicago at a pretty early age, and was introduced to the world of video games a bit by my brother back in Serbia and more so by elementary school friends in the States early on.

Shortly after setting my eyes on the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and experiencing the joys of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, I was hooked into this amazing sandbox of imagination and play! As mysterious as the industry was growing up in the 90s, I knew from 4th grade that I wanted in some way and capacity to work in the video games industry. Lots of time passed, and I stuck to those guns.

During my college term, I attended a fine arts school for a little while, then transferred to pursue a new degree that emerged called Game Art & Design at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago. During my last semester, a Technical Art Director from Midway Games visited my school. I introduced myself and shared my work. This yielded an internship role and then an immediate full-time job after I graduated as one of the first two with this new degree. A combination of blessings, luck, and chance for sure. The rest is history. There have been times of stability, turbulence, and different flavors of experience, all of which still continue to this day.

Grogu

My wife and I don't often have opportunities to watch television. But somehow, we quickly got sucked into The Mandalorian on Disney+. When the child (aka Grogu) was introduced, I instantly felt a tug in my heart, and I had to make him in 3D! I did need a palette cleanser as my work was winding down on The Last of Us Part II Remastered at the time, so I decided pouring time into making Grogu in 3D would be a perfect fit. 

Like for many in the industry, using PureRef has become a standard, essential part of my workflow for reference gathering. PureRef is a fantastic tool for pulling together all of your references onto a single canvas board. No more creating folders, naming, and organizing images, etc. For the Grogu project, I divided the references into specific areas of interest: the television show, macaron, eyeballs, community, Sideshow Collectible toy, orb, pram, and concepts. All of these aided me in capturing all the details I wanted to put into my rendition of the child.

Sculpting

Grogu's head process started straight in ZBrush. Here are the steps I took to create Grogu's head:

1. selected/appended a Sphere3D from the tool menu as a subtool,
2. activated Sculptris mode (menubar/ stroke > click Sculptris Pro or \ on keyboard), 
3. selected SnakeHook brush, pulled temp ear shapes out to communicate primitive forms,
4. redistributed temporary topology flow by DynaMeshing (menubar/ geometry > DynamMesh),
5. ran ZRemesher after to get a cleaner flow, dialed down the polygon count to a lower resolution level, and started working back up,
6. refined shapes mainly with Move/Clay brushes,
7. started adding primary/secondary details and subdivided, repeated this process multiple times,
8. further refined and finalized secondary/tertiary details with Standard, Move, Clay, Pinch, DamStandard, and Inflate brushes. Micro details and wrinkles were placed with various skin alpha brushes and hand-sculpting.

For Grogu's body cloth elements, I sculpted in big, chunky folds to convey his miniaturized size. A couple of things of note on the detailing of the garments. For the larger tertiary details, like the wool on the collar and cuffs, alpha brushes were used. Then additional details were sculpted on top using the Standard and Inflate brushes to pop out some of the threading. For the rest of the tunic, I focused only on primary and secondary forms in ZBrush, leaving the micro-detailing to Substance 3D Painter during the texturing phase. 

I also did an exercise exploring Grogu’s facial expressions in ZBrush. It was a great way to get a better feel for his personality range. Move, Morph, Standard, and DamStandard brushes were used in combination with layers and morph targets to shift around and sculpt in the facial forms.

Texturing

For Grogu's texture pass, I used the popular industry-standard Substance 3D Painter. Before I started, I set my environment map to Studio Tomoco. It’s one of several neutral HDRI maps that come packaged with the application. Selecting that HDRI light map helped me yield more accurate results with no biased lighting conditions as the textures were created. I went with the hand-painted texturing approach. I used a lemon skin material as a base for the head/hand portions, then built up colors for different color regions of the face with painted, masked fill layers. Additional details like skin imperfections, freckles, and speckles were painted in afterward. The Sideshow Collectibles figurine and TV Show references of Grogu came in really handy for inspiring and helping incorporate the correct skin hues and details.

Hair and robe fray alphas were hand-painted in Painter on a single quad polygon. This enabled me to seamlessly work on all the different maps at one time: base color, roughness, flow direction, subsurface, and transparency. Hair cards were modeled out and hand-placed on Grogu's head and robe afterward.

For the tunic, I started with a burlap base material for the body and a fleece material for the cuff/collar portions. Then I added layers of wear like bright/dark spots, shadow and grime, dark splotches, bottom fading, sun wear, grime/dirt/oil, mud, and damage.

Macaroon textures (base color in particular) were pieced together by photo projections. The orb and pram were textured using a similar approach to that of Grogu, using base materials and hand-painted buildup.

When creating Grogu’s likeness, I mainly focused on representing his features accurately to how they appear in the television show, The Mandalorian. But with one caveat – a cutesier version with a slightly larger cranium. The Sideshow Collectibles figurine was made to be a close recreation of the actual character in the show. Especially the production model. The artists from the show worked on the replica, so it proved to be a great and accurate source from which to draw. 

Retopology

I typically use Maya’s suite of Quad Draw tools under the Modeling Toolkit to retopologize meshes from their high-resolution counterparts. Same for unwrapping UVs and managing their texel densities and layouts. However, for some personal projects, including Grogu shown here, I powered through this portion of the project and used ZBrush’s and Maya’s ZRemesher/retopology tools to generate low polygon meshes. For a cleaner example of how I work out proper retopologized meshes for game engine use, check out my Metroid x Samus project.

Props

The pram and knob were both achieved with traditional box modeling, booleans, strategic edge placement, and general geometry cleanup afterward. This let me get cleaner topology flow as I subdivided the meshes. Again, the focus of this project was not to make the topology the cleanest but instead to preserve the edge flow well enough for the presentation of the final models, materials, and textures.

Lighting & Rendering

My software choice for Grogu’s real-time captures was Marmoset Toolbag, a fantastic program that I’ve been using since its inception. It is a great portfolio presentation tool that is always evolving and supporting the latest rendering trends and techniques. It has really evolved over the years and now even supports ray-traced lighting and shadow casting.

Previously, it was only reserved for offline rendering solutions like MentalRay and Arnold, but nowadays, Toolbag also supports animation, texturing, and baking. Even though I’ve dipped my toes in xNormal/Knald/Substance 3D over the years for baking, Toolbag is still my software of choice when it comes to texture baking because of its snappiness with real-time iterating and general workflow. Most importantly, it’s a good representation of what an asset might look like when integrated into a proper game engine.

Since my personal projects aren’t constrained by the realities of a professional game project, I don’t set limitations on how many lights I place in a render scene. For Grogu, I staged the lights according to the needs of each particular shot I wanted to create to show off the 3D model. Oftentimes, I ended up with a multitude of key, fill, and rim lights. Most are omni lights with one or two spotlights tying the whole scene together. With each light, adjustments to the shape and spot parameters were made to achieve softer shadowing. When lighting, I generally like to think of it as carving light into the model from pitch darkness. No different than a traditional sculptor chipping away at clay to bring in form and silhouette.

For rendering, ray-traced lighting was used with an economical 4 bounces but maximizing transmissions to 64 with denoising set to high.

Conclusion

My schedule is super-charged with work and family life, which keeps me quite busy each and every day. That makes it that much more important with any precious time remaining that I invest into some personal projects sometimes. This way, I can exercise my skills away from work, learn new ones, and improve as time permits. No matter the discipline, some practice on the side is always a good idea to stay current and keep your skills synced up to the latest industry trends, practices, and demands.

I’m guesstimating here, but my Grogu project took anywhere between 120 and 160 total man-days to bring to completion. After having my eyes fixated on The Last of Us content for quite some time beforehand, working in a different universe and on a different stylization with the type of shape language, Grogu presented was a refreshing change of pace.

It was challenging doing a character in Grogu’s form factor. He’s stubby and uniquely shaped. But his organic shapes, from the skin to the tunic, generally proved more forgiving to form, fit, and function and get his general look pinpointed. The pram was equally challenging in itself, it is hard-surface, and I don’t often work on these types of props. In the end, I pulled inspiration and references from all kinds of sources, such as the television show, toys, video games, artist renditions, and artbooks to fulfill my vision. I would call it a success. Thank you for learning more about this project and reading through the article. 

One thing that I’ve further established for myself by doing this project (and this is a useful one for Art Directors and Leads when parsing through portfolios), and maybe I’m stating the obvious here, but doing 3D character art in various styles and types becomes more natural as an artist continues to hone their craft and continuously improve and gain exposure to different forms of character creation.

My recommendation is, yes, craft your art to represent the places you want to work at, but don’t constrain your portfolio to just one specific studio. That would be a hard road to follow. Instead, show, at the very least, some variety and flex your artistic muscle to secure present and future successes. 

Keeping this in mind, I look forward to the character styles and types I might incorporate into future works, both personal and professional! And to what this wonderfully creative community continues to strive for and come up with to tell stories and support gameplay in the video games industry.

Ivan Miya, Senior Character Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford