LogInRafael Benedicto shared the workflow behind the Lucy project, explained how the hair was set up, and went over the texturing process done in Substance 3D Painter.
Introduction
Hello. My name is Rafael, and I am a freelance 3D Character Modeler.
I started developing my skills way before I started taking jobs, back in high school when I played around with a trial version of 3ds Max. As a teenager, I found the tutorials fun and engaging, so I eventually signed up for a student version of the software. From there, it was all a self-taught journey of searching for tutorials online and doing my own projects, learning how 3D modeling works and how to texture, light, rig, render, and animate. I started out as a 3D generalist. But I eventually gravitated towards character modeling because making 3D characters that look alive and feel real seems to be the ultimate expression of my artistic instincts; as opposed to, let's say, modeling buildings or vehicles.
Not long after I started learning 3ds Max, I volunteered as a 3D artist to make cinematics for a community-developed, non-profit StarCraft mod called Sons of War. The project didn't finish and barely anyone remembers it nowadays. But working on that project gave me an opportunity to fast-track my 3D modeling skills, doing 3D models of various StarCraft units and characters and learning the basics of 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, and even animation. I was obsessed with StarCraft, looking to the cinematics of Blizzard Entertainment as my inspiration. I thought to myself: "Someday, I'm going to make 3D characters as well as them."
The models I made for that project look like absolute crap compared to what I can make now. But it was my stepping-off point into what would become my career.
Most of my early work can be found on my DeviantArt page.
Browse the old stuff in that gallery at your own risk. You've been warned.
After Sons of War, I eventually took on paid jobs. The work I've done was mostly odd jobs for various clients (many of which can't be shown in public because of non-disclosure agreements).
I was primarily a hard surface modeler. Costume designers who make armored suits for cosplays sometimes hired me to model popular armor designs from movies and video games so they could then use that model to make accurate real-life cosplay armor.
My first big job was modeling the terran marine from StarCraft 2 for one of these costume makers. The client saw my work for Sons of War and asked if I could model a marine for him:
All the client really needed was the hard-surface model. But he didn't mind me texturing and rigging the entire thing and posting it online as part of my portfolio.
Other cosplay-related hard-surface jobs were my War Machine Mk.1 and Mk.3 models.
I wasn't really sure how they would make costumes out of these. But I got paid to do the jobs and I did them.
In between paid 3D jobs I mostly do personal projects to further improve my skills and add to my portfolio. My sculpting software of choice was Mudbox if I needed to do organic modeling. But after learning ZBrush in 2019, I've started doing less hard-surface work and more organic modeling work. This rare blend of being good at both hard-surface and organic modeling culminated in my work on Urban Ranger and Scout Annie, the latter of which won me 1st prize in the Reallusion Digital Human Contest 2020.
All these recent additions to my portfolio eventually caught the attention of indie game developers. I accepted work from one of them to model their characters for a Dark Souls-inspired project called Skars: Rise of the Last Keeper, which I am still involved with currently:
All the game characters I modeled for Skars are a mix of organic and hard-surface, but very medieval – a far cry from the robotic sci-fi characters I previously did.
The Lucy Project
I started the Lucy project as a way to pass some free time. After watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, I knew I'd be modeling one of these characters someday. I eventually settled on Lucy. My reason for choosing her was that I didn't have too much free time on my hands and she was relatively simple in design. And she's hot, what's not to like about her?
My goal was to do a heroic shot of her as if she's in the streets of Night City, moving fluidly in action with some dust, smoke, lights, and wind around her and not looking like she's in a studio photoshoot.
My primary reference was her original design from the show. While her design is pretty straightforward (no complex armor pieces, no cables running around, no mutated body parts, etc, turning a 2D anime character into a realistic 3D person was still no easy task. The most difficult part was her hair; it's a very unusual hairstyle but also strangely appealing.
For that, I had to look at various cosplayers to see how they tackled Lucy's hair. In fact, I have more cosplayer references just for her hair than actual screenshots of her from the show.
Head
The first thing I did was open up Character Creator where I customized her appearance using its tools. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't have much free time on my hands and I'd rather use a customizable pre-made base model than spend a hundred hours sculpting her from scratch.
I wanted her face to look similar to her anime face while keeping her proportions realistic. This means no huge creepy anime eyes like in the Alita: Battle Angel movie (that movie was incredible, but her uncanny-valley eyes just creeped me out too much).
Aside from doing her makeup in Photoshop and applying it in Character Creator, this was pretty much all I did for her face and body.
Character Creator also includes pre-made texture maps for her entire body, some up to 4K in size. From my experience in Scout Annie, I've learned how to apply these texture maps to a V-Ray material. So once I imported her into 3ds Max, creating the VrayAlSurfaceMtl material for her skin was manageable. Although doing it for her entire body was still pretty complex, especially since I had to blend in the materials for her cyberware seams later on.
Hair
The biggest challenge, as I mentioned, was her hair. It took me more time and trial and error to get the hair looking right than the time I spent working on the rest of her. I did her eyebrows before doing her main hair.
The first tool I used for this task was a nifty little program called FiberShop to render the hair strands for the hair cards. This is an extremely useful program that can render all the necessary texture maps for the hair cards, including normals and direction maps. No need for complicated rendering setups in 3ds Max or Maya just to render the hair fibers. Just draw the hair strands however you like in FiberShop and it takes care of rendering out the maps.
I imported the hair cards into ZBrush where I used its very useful "Bend Curve" transform tool to manually manipulate them however I want.
I then had to import the hair back into 3ds Max to see how it looks when rendered. It took a lot of trial and error, moving between ZBrush and 3ds Max to get the hair looking exactly how I wanted it. But all that experimentation eventually paid off, as the final result shows.
Eyes
For the eyes, I decided to make my own. I ditched the eyes from Character Creator and made my own higher-quality eyeballs, complete with the various layers that make up a real eye: the eyeball (or sclera), the moist layer surrounding the eyeball, the cornea (transparent front of the eye), and the iris and pupil.
I still used the texture from Character Creator for the eyeball, but I made my own custom iris with the various colors as seen in her anime version.
One thing that sells the believability of the eyes is a thin wet layer surrounding the front visible part of the eye. It's a thin mesh that overlaps the surrounding skin and the visible edges of the eye. It has a transparent, glossy, slightly opaque material with blurry refractions that emulate the tears climbing out onto the eyelids. Aside from slightly darkening the edges of the eye, it also creates glossy reflections that make the eye appear moist and alive.
Outfit
While her body was created in Character Creator, her outfit was made from scratch. Most of her outfit is skin-tight. I used ZBrush's masking tool to mask out the parts where her clothes are supposed to be, extracted a mesh out of those parts, then used ZBrush's other tools to form the basics of her outfit.
The more complicated details of her suit like those found on her chest, legs, and belt were done with ZBrush's IMM brush feature with pre-made meshes bought from ArtStation. They're quick and easy to apply and saved me a lot of time instead of having to model all those small details from scratch.
Her jacket is the only part of her outfit that isn't skin-tight. So for that, I used Marvelous Designer to create the jacket and simulate its complex folds. I've had previous experience with Marvelous Designer, and this jacket wasn't too hard to make.
After creating the base for her jacket in Marvelous, I imported it back into ZBrush where I added all the detail. The top rim of the jacket was done in 3ds Max because it required a more hard-surface approach to make. But everything else was finished off in ZBrush.
Retopology & Unwrapping
The final polycount of the clothing was 12.7 million. Even a relatively amateur 3D artist knows that all this needs to be retopologized in order for it to be textured, rigged, and posed along with the body.
For this task, I used TopoGun. It's the primary retopology tool I've been using for 10 years. It's also capable of texture baking normals, displacement, AO maps, etc. And it bakes some of the highest-quality hardware-traced AO maps I've ever seen.
I just export the high-res mesh from ZBrush, import it as a reference mesh in TopoGun, and start retopologizing. It's mostly a manual and very slow process that can be a bit boring sometimes. I often take regular breaks because of how mind-numbing the task can be. But getting the retopology right is extremely important if I wanted to bake accurate maps. So I persisted. If you want precision, the best way to do retopology is manually.
Each piece of clothing was retopologized separately: the top, the belt, the pouch on her belt, the belt buckle, the leg, and the jacket. But before the maps can be baked, I needed to unwrap the low-poly meshes. That's where RizomUV comes in. It's another useful little program that allows me to quickly and efficiently unwrap meshes with a few clicks. After manually adding the cutting lines, I just press a button and it all automatically unwraps. It also shows you where the mesh is stretched and needs more cutting lines around it.
After unwrapping each outfit piece, I import the mesh back into TopoGun and bake the maps. The 4 maps I always bake in TopoGun are the Normals, Displacement, Hardware Ambient Occlusion, and Color ID. The large parts of her outfit such as her top and her legs had to have 8K-size maps in order to preserve all the details.
After the maps were baked, I did test renders of them in 3ds Max with V-Ray to see if all the details from the high-poly mesh were preserved. After I was satisfied with the result, I proceeded to the next step.
Texturing
If you're familiar with Cyberpunk, you know that it's a world where people are obsessed with cybernetic implants. And all this body modification work is visible on characters' skins as deep grooves, sometimes even more than that. Lucy's cyberware implants are very minimal (at least on the outside). But still, I had to add the cyberware seams on her skin that appears real and not just textured in. So for that, I went back to ZBrush and sculpted the seams.
I then proceeded to bake them as Normal, Displacement, and AO maps for her visible body parts, using the already existing body mesh as the low poly mesh. No need for retopologizing work.
I then had to mix the newly baked maps with the existing maps for the V-Ray material. I also had to add a displacement map in the 3ds Max modifier stack on top of 4 levels of Turbosmooth so that the seams would appear as actual deep grooves in the skin.
I had to blend a metal material into the seams. For that, I used Substance 3D Painter to paint the opacity maps for the metal parts of the seams.
All I needed here were opacity maps, not baked textures. So I used two contrasting colors to determine where the opacity will be applied. The red is the opacity map for the metal layer. This is also how I created the smaller metal lines which did not need to be sculpted.
The blue is the "transition" layer where the skin meets the metal. This is a blend layer for a different, darker skin material to create a more believable boundary between skin and metal.
I exported the masks for these layers and applied them to the skin material
I did also apply some Normal detail on the skin in Substance 3D Painter, and these need to be baked, exported, and blended along with the other normal maps for the skin.
The final result was worth all the experimentation.
The textures on her outfit are very simple and clean and don't need any special techniques, unlike my previous works which had lots of texture details. I used Substance 3D to paint her outfit, exported the maps, and applied them to the basic VrayMtl material. I just made sure that I applied the normal maps for her clothing which were baked earlier. Nothing more was done.
Rendering
My primary (and favorite) rendering engine is V-Ray. I personally think it's the best CPU rendering engine so far. Arnold is more accurate as an unbiased renderer, but I find it has fewer features and its output quality is harder to control. I've also recently been using the ultra-fast Redshift for my freelance work (15-20x faster than V-Ray), but due to it being a GPU renderer, it's much less reliable and prone to crashes than a CPU renderer, and it's limited by the memory of your GPU.
With V-Ray as my rendering engine, I naturally had to use V-Ray lights for the scene.
For my fill light, I used a dome light with an old HDRI spherical photo of a city street which I myself shot years ago. This HDRI map also creates the background for the render.
Next are blue and pink backlights which are pretty much my dual key lights. Then there's a white rim light to create some rim lighting.
Last is a catch light which exclusively affects only the wet layers of the eyes. The purpose of this light is to create some highlights on the eyes to make them look wet and alive.
This is the original raw render, minus the HDRI background.
I never settle for the raw render. It can still be improved and tweaked to give me the exact look I want. For this reason, I also included render elements along with the main RGB pass. Many of them are the output passes of the lights. If you're wondering what the "Specular Sheen" is for, I used it to control how much of the vellum hair (peach fuzz) is visible on her skin. Meanwhile, the Specular map was used to control the shininess of her face.
How this all works in Photoshop is, if I want to reduce, let's say, the output of the blue light from the RGB Beauty pass, I turn the blue light layer into a subtract layer. On the other hand, if I want to increase the output of the blue light, I use a duplicate layer but turn it into a linear dodge or add a layer. This works with the Specular maps as well. I use masks to localize their effects and not end up adding or subtracting the elements from the entire image. All this needs to be worked in 32-bit mode or else there would be some strange results.
I also painted in some additional hair details from this mode. This allows me to have better control of the transparency of the painted hair strands.
For the final post-processing, I had to convert it all into 8-bit mode to make sure it appears the same way in web browsers. It also allows me to use the various Photoshop tools that become unavailable in 32-bit mode
This final 8-bit post-processing included adding some smoke layers, some particles, glowy bits, color adjustments, and some sharpening for final polishing. And not to forget the movie poster text.
Conclusion
I worked on Lucy during my free time in the past several months. But during the month of May, there was a lull in the freelance jobs from my usual client. So I took that time to work on Lucy full-time before my client sends in his next job. And I finished Lucy just in the nick of time. So this entire project took around 1.5 months if it was a full-time job.
My advice to beginning character artists is to understand that this is not an easy and quick skill set to learn. Two years ago I once chatted with a beginner artist, a fellow Filipino. He was asking me to personally tutor him so that he will become as good as me so he could make enough money for his family. He said he has only been doing character art for 2 months.
I asked him if he is willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of hours to learn to become as good as me.
He basically told me he needs to make money quickly, didn't answer the question, and proceeded with telling his own story about how he recently lost his previous job, how he is not enjoying his new job, he's not making enough money, and wants to make 3D character art his full-time money-making career.
I simply told him to watch FlippedNormals as those guys create good tutorials, then told him that I couldn't personally tutor him. Two years later, I checked his ArtStation portfolio, expecting it to have lots of new artwork that would show his improved skills. But, alas, his portfolio is the same as it was two years ago, with only two artworks uploaded and nothing else. It's clear that he gave up early and moved on to something else that could fulfill his immediate financial needs.
Understand: earning money is good. However, if the main reason why you want to learn 3D character art, or any artistic field in general, is to make money, then you will end up not making money out of it. That's the irony.
The heart and soul of every artistic work is passion, persistence, and dedication to the craft, whether you're a sculptor, a painter, a digital sculptor, a digital painter, an architect, an environment artist, or a 3D character artist.
Every high-quality art has the mark of passion, persistence, and dedication burned into it, and that's the appeal of high-quality art – that's what people pay for.
Your primary motive for learning 3D character art should be for the sake of learning 3D character art. Modeling, sculpting, UV mapping, texturing, lighting, rendering, post-processing, and other techniques, take the time to master all these skills. Don't make money your primary motive – don't chase the money – the money will come to you eventually, whether it will be in a few years or several years of constant practice.
You don't have a job? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You do have a job? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You're broke? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You're rich? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You're sick? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You just got married? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. Your girlfriend left you? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. Your dog died? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. You broke your leg in a horrific accident? Keep practicing 3D character modeling. Practice, practice, practice.