How to Create a Realistic Portrait of Arcane's Vi in ZBrush, Maya & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hello again! I am Joshua, an Indonesian 3D Artist specializing in character creation. A few years ago, I did a breakdown for my Arcane Jinx fanart, and thanks to 80 Level, I am back here again to share a little bit more about my Arcane Vi fanart. It won't be as long as the previous one because 65% of the workflow can be viewed in my previous breakdown of Jinx. Please check it out if you haven't!

With the hype of Arcane season 2 releasing this year, I wanted to do another character from Arcane who solidifies the show for me: Vi. I hope you learn a thing or two!

About the Vi Fanart Project

Just like before, my goal was to translate Vi into a more semi-realistic style without killing the original design and nuance. The characters in Arcane felt so alive despite being a very stylized animation, and I really adore the characters for that. This time around, I had more references than I would ever need, which helped me so much throughout the whole character creation process.

Sculpting

I started the sketch from the sphere without really thinking too much about proportions and likeness. All I did was turn off my brain and blindly follow the references. Of course, it did not turn out well the first time. But it is always a process.

This time around, I did not use Marvelous Designer for the clothing; I wanted to be fast, so I sculpted everything in ZBrush. Everything was done traditionally using DynaMesh and ZRemesher workflow.

The whole sculpting process was organic, and the proportions kept changing as I eyeballed throughout the end. Every day, there was something to be improved, even at the rendering stage.

I apologize for the bad-looking images; I did not have most of my earlier files to get new screenshots!

Portrait

For skin details, I used Texturing XYZ's VFace. I Zwraped the model into my Vi's head sketch and then kept improving from there using the hand-sculpted techniques accordingly. Props to the Texturing XYZ team for the amazing base models.

I believe they have provided the necessary tutorials on YouTube if you want to dive a little bit more into it. Here is the official YouTube channel.

UV & Texturing

I was not planning to do a production ready model, so everything was done hideously. The UV was all over the place, and texturing was done in Substance 3D using the most basic technique known to man. But here are some screengrabs of the maps:

LookDev & Grooming

Since I explained a lot of my workflow on my Jinx breakdown, this time, I am just going to share a little bit more about the art direction, as well as my approach to translating the stylized version into mine.

• The first result will not look the best, so keep on iterating and improving every day. Your eyes will refresh every time you take a long break. Trust the process.
• Try to imagine what would happen if this were another person's artwork. Try to give it feedback without having any attachment to your work to be able to critique your own progress objectively.
• I kept comparing my progress to the source material, again and again, until it felt right.
• I did more than 100 iterations in order to get the result I wanted. 

The whole process was done using a standard Surface Shader in Arnold Maya. The hair was done using XGen. There are tons of free tutorials out there, so do your diligence!

Lighting & Cinematics

Now, this is the fun part. I was trying to challenge myself by incorporating my renders into pre-existing movie stills that I got from ShotDeck. Just like before, I got a lot of tips and tricks from a friend of mine, Vincent Hebrard. Please check out his stuff, too!

First, I tested my model in different types of HDRI without any extra lights to see how it turned out.

After that, I picked a few different stills that I wanted to use for Vi. Here is one example. The scene I am going to use is the last cinematic shot I did. The original still is from The Road 2009.

• The first thing I did was insert the movie still into my camera in Maya as a background. Then, I eyeballed Vi's position the way I saw fit.
• Then, I added a skydome with a similar color and mood and super low intensity for the ambient light.
• The rest was done with two extra large area lights. I tried to position it as close as the reference.
• The raw render was super dark, so I did some color correction, value check, and editing in Photoshop — basically, the compositing.

I did six shots in total to practice and do some tinkering. Although the results may not be perfect, as I was short on time, I prioritized the smooth transition between the character and the background. As long as Vi belonged in the shot, it was fine for me. Each shot took around two to four hours to complete with a similar workflow.

Conclusion

And there you go! I hope you enjoy the short breakdown for Vi. Thanks again to the 80 Level team for the opportunity to share more about my journey as an artist. If you like it, please check out my ArtStation and Instagram pages. I post all my artwork there!

Cheers!

Joshua Gouw, Character Artist