How to Make 3D Model of Avatar's Zuko Look Like Painting

"I taught myself to play the piano, drawing accompanied me in every high school class, and eventually 3D led me to find my peace and refuge. Although it was a challenge to find my way in animation, I believe my teenage self could never have imagined what I had learned and taught since I started working in 3D.

Currently, I work as a character modeler and a texture artist on Star Wars Young Jedi Adventures in addition to tutoring at some 3D schools. I have also contributed to Naruto, Netflix's shows, and some short and long films, and led various teams. However, it is my personal projects that really allowed me to explore and understand different styles and characters, They keep me constantly engaged in learning and evolving, adapting to my passions and connections with different characters. This personal journey has motivated me not only to master texturing and modeling but also to delve into other areas such as lighting, grooming, and compositing."

"For this project, my main references were Arcane and Spiderverse. I remember when I saw a behind-the-scenes of Arcane where they asked the artists how they achieved that style to make it look 2D, and their answer was simple but great: 'We paint!'

Although it sounds 'basi', it seemed like painting was a beautiful distant talent. That’s why I decided to go back to practicing painting. I don’t consider myself someone who knows how to paint too well, so I had a lot to learn."

"Spiderverse, on the other hand, creates a new animation style for me that is not limited to being 2D or 3D; it combines a variety of styles effectively. This led me to wonder what would happen if I merged these two approaches: using a complex shader that responds in a stylized way according to the lights and the 3D environment but also incorporating hand paint into the maps, moving away from the conventional PBR."

"I have seen the wonders NPR (non-physically based rendering) pieces made in Blender but also, I have seen very little in Maya/Arnold, so my mission was to transfer this 2D world with hand-painting but from Maya.

Once I knew my influences and what I wanted to achieve, modeling the character and starting the initial texture was relatively quick. But when I started to play with hand-painting and the shader, I realized that I needed to experiment more before finishing it. That’s why I decided to launch another quick intermediate test project, a personal Halloween project, with which I could start playing with the NPR shaders and the style I wanted to use later.

The Halloween project had more composition after the rendering of the final result. With Zuko, my intention was to fix all the mistakes I had with the previous project and make the final result come from the render, with much less composition and more handling of hand-painting and the shaders from the beginning."

"Once I have my base mesh, I work on the character's appearance in the T-pose, I do the initial appeal within Maya and a basic proxy of the clothes. This helps me train my eye to translate the character’s design to a more neutral angle. Once I’m satisfied with the basic design, I move to ZBrush to pose the character and get closer to the transition from 2D to 3D. This is where I usually give the final expression and pose to the character and also correct any problems that may have occurred with the proportions."

"The hair was made as geometry to have a direction guide. Once I know how the proxy is going to look, I move to Maya to make the guides with XGen. I use the system of drawing my guides with curves and the snap tool, as I feel I have more control over where I want my guides to go and it doesn’t take as long as doing it one by one manually."

"I used two different Collections, one for the hair that is more random and voluminous and another with much thicker hair but also with much less density, this helped me to have an effect of having stripes drawn in the 3D hair."

"Since my character has a clean topology and UVs that I can easily reuse from the start, I don’t spend much time on this step. What I usually do is unfold the UVs within Maya and keep the topology quite faithful to what I originally had. In the past, I used to rig my characters, so this help me to re-use the same system if I want to. Keeping the same clean topology lets me quickly focus on determining how much detail I’m going to have and how many UDIMs I’m going to need. I knew I was going to use hand painting for the textures, so I worked on the skin with only 5 UDIMs for the skin, giving a higher texel density to the face, arms, and hands.

It was divided into three main materials for Substance 3D Painter: skin, robe, and clothes."

"With all the experimentation I had up to that point and especially the knowledge from the Halloween project, I started on a good path. These were the first renders that began to catch my attention. However, I still felt that I was far from the hand-painted mix that I wanted to give it. After 78 renders in my Arnold snapshots folder, I realized that I needed to work more on my understanding of digital painting rather than editing my node system; that’s when the results started to get closer to what I was looking for."

"The hand-painting in the project involved generating a feeling of a sketch, something that I am cleaning, brush after brush. This allows you to see where the change in tonality from one color to another is created. Therefore, my task was to learn to paint in a more conventional way, forgetting about the roughness, metalness, and PBR, and focusing on making my diffuse feel good.

The character's eyes were really important too for the appeal since I didn't have the chance to add reflections or refractions. My aim was to give them life while keeping a touch of imperfection in the shapes. This approach ensured that the eyes had their own cartoon feeling, rather than feeling like a standard template."

"The shader, on the other hand, is based on several layers, where each layer breaks the albedo pass a bit, so all my information is transferred to the diffuse by means of a toon shader that helps me make the shadows and highlights dynamic, according to the direction of my lights in the 3D environment, my idea was not to bake lights from the textures but rather make my textures react dynamically to the lights in my scene. Also, the fresnel helped me to break the colors on the edges of the geometry, making them look more washed away."

"Finally, the paint lines, which limit each part of the body and give it the effect of being drawn on the edges, is a mix of the Arnold toon shader (Contour) and lines manually painted on the 3D geometry."

"With the shader based on Arnold’s toon shader, almost all the information about lights and shadows comes from the albedo pass. That’s why for this project, it was more important for me to know how my albedo looks and not my beauty. Once I had both passes, I only left the albedo pass as the base and the beauty pass at 30% opacity to help me with some of the volumes and certain lights in the scene.

I also took care of extracting the contour lines with Maya’s toon shader in a different render layer. This was done with the idea of being able to have control over lines created in the software itself, depending on where the camera angle is, mainly useful for animation. The compositing was done with After Effects.

Here is an example of the render but only with the albedo pass, without the volumes that the beauty gives me or any other render pass. It was very important to have a clean pipeline from the start so that the final result feels just as clean without the need to resort to 100% composition, something that I didn’t achieve with the original Halloween project but finally did in the Zuko project."

"I started the project in October of the previous year, working on it during my weekends and after the classes I usually teach. Although the time was short from week to week, it was very gratifying to see how it improved each week, taking in mind what I wanted to have.

One of the biggest challenges was interpreting hand-painting and applying it to the pipeline I’m used to, which is a more conventional PBR. I believe that our animation industry is advancing by leaps and bounds, with AI here to stay and animation studios experimenting with more ways to tell ideas. I believe that part of my role as an artist in the industry is to understand how the flow of animation works. We are moving, we are changing, and once again, the artistic foundations that each of us should have, such as painting, photography, lighting, among others, are fundamental to move with the flow of art."

"For me, there are two key pieces of advice when it comes to creating a character. The first is to understand your references and the background of your character. Connecting with what you are creating greatly facilitates the process and opens the door to experimentation. It’s not about jumping into the void and hoping it turns out nice.

The second piece of advice is to do personal projects where you can make a lot of mistakes. This is your playground where you don’t have a big production depending on you. Instead, you get inspired, grow, and improve. I understand that as artists, we don’t want to end our workday only to go back to work more. But that’s why it’s not a race, it’s a marathon in which you move at your own pace. I know super talented friends who finish a project every 1 or 2 years and others who finish a new one every week. The point is to enjoy the process. And if you don’t enjoy it, maybe you should take a long pause and consider how you want to take your art. There are many valid and beautiful paths. It helps me a lot to ask myself: "Why do I keep doing this?" And it’s because I enjoy personal growth in my area. It helps me connect with new people and with myself.

Currently, I have already started my next personal project, which will put even more at stake and polish everything I have already learned with Zuko. I also plan to release the whole process of the new project, step by step, and with the shader ready for anyone who wants to use it. So if you’re interested, you can keep an eye out for future updates!

Thanks to 80 level for the space to share the knowledge of Zuko!"