How to Create Stylized Day of The Dead-Themed Skeleton Character in 3D

Introduction

Hello! My name is Denis Kildyushev. I am a 17-year-old 3D character modeler from Russia. My path in 3D art started when I watched a video on YouTube in which a person decided to create a Chrome dinosaur game in 3D voxel style.

This instantly hooked me as I wanted to try to make something in a similar style. The same day, I installed Magica Voxel on my PC and created these two masterpieces:

I am still really proud of these projects, I think they turned out really good, especially for the first time. After creating around five models in this program, I wanted to learn more about the world of 3D and what opportunities it can give me, so I went online to look for some tutorials on Magica Voxel.

On YouTube, I accidentally found the iconic Donut tutorial by Blender Guru. I was amazed looking at the preview of the video. The final result was so realistic and tasty that I wanted to do it myself. I installed Blender and was shocked by the amount of buttons and functions it had compared to Magica Voxel. I decided to follow this one tutorial and see if I liked this program or not. I completed the full Donut with animation in a month; I think it took me so long because my friends from school asked me to go play Fortnite with them every day (I tried to resist, but it was really difficult). Here is the result of me following the Donut tutorial. Now, I can see a lot of flaws in the render, but when I finished the project, it felt like I was a genius.

After finishing the Donut tutorial, I decided to try props, and the results were not good because I did not have enough skills to create high-quality assets at the time. Here are some of my projects after the Donut tutorial:

When I acquired some skills through watching YouTube tutorials and reading forums, I decided to try creating interiors because I always loved scenes with a lot of things in them.

I only managed to create around three interiors, because I quickly got bored, interiors seemed too technical for me, there was not that much creativity you could put into the scene. Here are some of my interior projects:

As I already said, the interiors seemed too technical for me. Therefore, I decided to look for something more creative, and the character art was the thing I had been looking for for a long time. I learned that the best tool for sculpting was ZBrush, after watching some tutorials and creating some of my first projects I knew it was the thing I wanted to do. My first projects were really ugly as you can expect, my favorite is Kolobok by the way, I think he is the creepiest one of them all.

I started looking for more in-depth tutorials on ZBrush to get more skills, and after a lot of hours sculpting and working hard in the software, I acquired more and more experience.

The Mariarchi Project

I was scrolling through Pinterest the other day and found this amazing concept by Nicolas Bara. I immediately loved the character and decided to make it come to life in 3D, especially the pose that seemed really dynamic to me. That helped to make the character look much more alive on the concept. I had some trouble finding the original image because Pinterest usually lowers the quality of pictures uploaded there, but after 15 minutes of searching, I found the source image on Facebook.

And yeah, I know it also lowers quality, but it does not do it as significantly as Pinterest does.

References

When it came to gathering references, I recalled that the Pixar animation feature film Coco had the same vibe as my concept. So, I used some references from this movie to see how a big studio like Pixar would handle creating stylized skeletons with clothes. Of course, I found references to real skeleton anatomy to better understand shapes and proportions.

For the banjo, I also gathered some references from online marketplaces to see it from all possible angles and better understand the shapes, as I have never seen one in real life.

This character had a lot of clothing, so I decided to experiment with displacement textures a bit to get a more realistic result. Because I had never done this before, I felt like my computer would not be able to handle this much computation. But thanks to the 3D gods and Blender, of course, everything went smoothly without crashing, and my PC blew up. This work of Alexandre Mougenot was a huge inspiration for this aspect. I really love all the details on Mario's clothes.

Modeling

As always, I started with a sphere and first sculpted the head of the character because it's one of the most important parts of any character.

With other primitives, I blocked out the rest of the character. I quickly wanted to get a good topology for the character, so after the blockout stage, I went to Maya and used Quad Draw to retopologize everything so I could continue working with clean topology.

After retopology zing everything, it was time for posing and adding details. I decided not to create a complete A-pose for this character because it would be more difficult to find the proportions from the original concept.

This character did not have that many little details to sculpt, so I think the only two details I made in ZBrush were the ones on the hat sculls and on the banjo. I used a Trim Dynamic brush to give this edgy feeling to them.

When I had the final character sculpt on my hands, it was time to move on to creating UVs.

UVs for this character were created in Blender. I sent a low-poly to Blender, added seams for every object, and made sure the UV islands had no stretching.

When it comes to laying out UVs, I always use the UVPackmaster 3 add-on for Blender. It helps lay out your UVs in the most efficient way. For Mariarchi, I used three UDIMs for UV. I think I could make it four for even more details on the textures, but it seemed to me that three was enough.

I then baked normal and curvature maps in Marmoset toolbag 5 to restore details on hat sculls and banjo, the rest of the maps I generated in Substance 3D Painter.

Texturing

When it came to texturing, I spent a lot of time looking for clothes patterns that would look cool with displacement and match the atmosphere and story of the character. I ended up using textures from a lot of different sources, such as Blender Kit and CC0 Textures.
In Substance 3D Painter, I did not load eyes and strings because I used the Auto eye add-on in Blender. It's a really powerful tool that allows you to create any eyes you can imagine.

For the strings, first, I just filled them with color and called it a day, but when I wanted to create a close-up of Mariarchi’s hand holding the banjo, I quickly understood that it felt really simple and boring, so I added some grunge to the roughness channel. I found this grunge in the Realistic Touch add-on, which is essentially a library of tons of different grunges, scratches, and other maps.

In Substance 3D Painter, I created folders for each type of material and colorized them to organize my files better. I also added a Sharpen filter on top of everything to kind of give this crispness to the textures.

The Hat

The longest part of texturing clothes for this character was drawing the pattern on his hat. First, I thought I could find something like this on the Internet and quickly understood that all patterns from online looked too boring and repetitive. So I had to draw it by hand. I used two fill layers for it and paint layers in it with paths. I think the Path is one of the best procedural tools in the new Substance 3D Painter version. You can always change its direction, color, pattern, and size. What really helped to make this pattern believable is the Blur Slope filter. I added it on top of paint layers and tweaked the settings until I found the result that worked the best for me. I also added Gaussian spots 1 on top of the entire pattern with subtracting blending mode to give it more dirt and make it look a bit older.

The Banjo

The metal part of the banjo was probably the easiest and fastest to texture. For a base, I just used some metal material from the default library of Substance 3D Painter. After that I added some grunges and scratches on top to make it look more interesting. The most important channel for metal is roughness, in my opinion, so I wanted to make it look as interesting as possible. I really like this grunge I found for the roughness channel. It's called Grunge Leaks. I added it in a fill layer and made it look shiny. I do not know why, but I really like how it looks with this grunge.

The central part was a lot of fun to create. I remember how I woke up an hour earlier before school just to texture it. First, I generated some curvature mask and made the peaks brighter. This helped to make my model closer to the 2D concept. Underneath this curvature generator, I added five different grunges. I think I spent around an hour finding the ones I enjoyed the most. After that, I picked colors from the concept and tweaked them to work the best in the 3D world. I also played with each grunge's value so they do not have the same brightness. Here are the final layers I created for the banjo's center:

Lighting & Rendering

For rendering Mariachi, I used Cycles in Blender. My lighting setup was really complicated. If I just created three or four light sources, then the lighting would not match the concept.

Instead of placing three or four lights for the whole scene, I used the Light Linking function in Blender; I enjoy this function a lot. It allows you to make a light source affect only one object without spreading light to other objects. With this workflow, my scene has 32 lights, and my record is 240 for the Alibaba project. In the scene itself, all the lights look crazy, but actually, every light source has its purpose and meaning. After setting up all my lights, I decided to add HDRI to the scene with an emission value of 0.1 just to fill all the dark spots in the scene with lights.

For the lighting background, I used a circle with an emission shader to get the shape of light I wanted.

Compositing

After rendering project, I used Blender compositor to make some quick adjustments to the image. I added such effects as lens distortions, film grain and made the render look a bit warmer.

Here are some final renders I made for this project:

Conclusion

This project took me around 3 weeks to complete. The folder with the project was created on May 1st, and the project was published on ArtStation on May 18th.

I enjoyed working the most on the texturing stage, it was really a lot of fun experimenting with all the parameters and looking for the best result. I would say that what challenged me the most was a new workflow for me. Creating a rough A pose and sending it to Maya to retopology, then pose it and unwrap the model. This workflow is definitely more convenient for creating characters in a certain pose like Mariarchi. Your UVs and textures have no stretching. But for characters that will be animated this workflow will not work.

From this project, I learned a lot. I learned the most about how displacement maps work and how to use them on clothes in Substance 3D Painter. I would be glad if you checked out some of my other work on ArtStation here.

Thank you for your time!

Denis Kildyushev, 3D Character Modeler

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford