Dominika Bariakova did a huge breakdown of her awesome cyberpunk character, Hydra, shared her workflow of going from the concept to a full 3D character, discussed body and hair creation and mentioned some useful tutorials on the character production she relied on.
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Hi, my name is Dominika Bariakova, I’m 3D Character artist from Slovakia.
I studied game graphics in Digital Arts and Entertainment in Kortrijk, Belgium. There, I learned the general game art pipeline, and I already had some cool props in my portfolio during my studies. My true passion, however, would be found much later in characters, when we first opened up Zbrush.
I loved videogame characters ever since I was a kid, so it was no surprise that a character artist would be my dream job. I worked hard to create characters for my portfolio outside of school as the time when I was supposed to look for an internship was getting closer.
I moved to the UK, where I did my internship as a character artist and later became even a junior. I would constantly work on my personal art, and one day I decided that I wanted to work on a very challenging project that was on my mind for a long time.
Concepting Hydra
While I was still in the college, I had this sketch in my folders. It was my speed sculpt with overpainting on the top of it. I did that overnight once when I didn’t felt like sleeping yet.
It was a cyberpunk anime girl head, I called her infected project. She had this beautiful monster kind of vibe, and I was fascinated by it. Because I moved to the UK and started a new job, I kind of put her on my backlog and was focusing on other things.
After some time, I wanted to create a cyberpunk character again. A character to show off all my skills and to learn some new. One day when skyping with my mom, she suggested going back to the Infected girl, and I loved that idea. I knew, however, that her concept would have to be remade first.
She had this huge and voluminous ponytail mixed with cables. This had to be scratched right away because the physics wouldn't allow it to look in 3D as nice as it seemed in 2D (and also because it was stylized). But without her big hair, her head seemed too small and, therefore, I decided to give her a voluminous hood instead.
Right after that, I added the body and started brainstorming. I knew I wanted her to be very mysterious. Sometimes, she would be a robot from the future infected with a human virus, sometimes, she would be an unfortunate person who went through a time travel portal, and her body couldn't handle it.
In the end, she became a Hydra. Hydra is a very disturbingly beautiful robot with a cautious personality. She carries a very heavy sword that she uses for a certain ritual. She is a beautiful monster.
With this in mind, I created 2 concepts. Her core parts for me were: dominant sci-fi chest, big hood, warpaint, and huge sci-fi ritual sword. I liked the idea of her design being tied to either red lights and red hanging cloth colors or blue lights and golden colors.
Hydra
Modeling
I used my own basemesh and then, I started to add fat and muscle where I felt I needed it the most. I put the most attention into her torso and belly area as this would be the most important part. My basemesh face was very stylized, so I had to completely redo it in order to have a nice and basic realistic female body (with intentionally exaggerated leg length as was in concept)
Clothes and Hard Surface Sculpting
After I had a base that I was happy with, I started tackling one of her most crucial parts - the bodysuit. To create sci-fi bodysuit, I first created something that looked like a gymnastics suit with some basic folds, and then I started to mask out places to create an interesting shape that looked close to my concept. Once I had things masked out, I used ClayBuildup to push some layers to back and some to front.
I tried to create very soft muscular feel to go naturally with the body flow. Not too much, just a healthy balance of it. After that, I skinned her down throught transpose master as the extra cloth changed my original silhouette. The result was surprisingly very detailed already, and I was happy to continue blocking out the rest.
After a very solid start, I decided to block out the whole model. With legs and arms, I went for a similar feel as the bodysuit has. I wanted to make sure that legs and arms look like they are able to function in real life and not just look like pretty sticks.
These were all created inside ZBrush. In order to have a very clean and hard surface feel, I would use masks almost constantly to break down the basic shapes into more interesting ones.
Blocking out the hood was one of the more difficult tasks as it’s very easy to make hood material feel droppy (because that is how we often see it). I was very careful when sculpting it, to make the material feel much thicker, so it would make sense that it stands and doesn't drop down or fold like a regular hood.
Face: Adding a Life
After base mechanics were sculpted, I went back to face to give her some life and uniqueness. I also added a robotic neck and chin plus I also finally did her warpaint. I was generally satisfied with her result so far. However, I felt like the most dominant part of her concept - her chest - was a big mess and the chest gear I added started to remind me more and more of an old car tire. I knew I would have to change it despite it being in my sketchy concept that way.
It was a very difficult decision as I would have to ignore the concept and I didn’t like that. Her chest was filled with many distracting things to look at and I knew I had to either improve on her current chest design or to completely change it.
Changes to Design
When I tried to change her design, to go in a different direction, it felt like I was going way too far from my concept and the overall feel. After some longer break, I finally came up with the best solution to this problem. I decided to completely clean her chest from all the 3D distractions and went back to comparing her to my concept.
With empty space on the chest now, I created a new gear-shaped specifically to bring more attention to her cleavage.
While comparing with my concept, I realized that I still haven't used black oil. It was supposed to be a smaller part of the concept, a detail, but with her chest being the main center of attention and too naked at the moment, I decided “Why not bleed the oil all over her chest instead?”. And so it was done. Hydra was back on track to the following concept, just went in a slightly different direction!
Sculpting Back and Finishing Touches
The back was only about to be sculpted since the front was my main worry for the most part. I sculpted back very carefully in order to not affect the front silhouette or to not have specific elements poking out to the front.
Quality and detail of the back were secondary to me as I knew that there will be still a huge sword to be added on top. However because the front was so complex, back felt empty in comparison. So in the end, I added way more details than was originally expecting. One of the parts that I am most happy with is the addition of extra cloth layers both on top and bottom, which made the back look way more interesting. The extra cloth was done simply through extraction. Once extraction was done I smoothed it out, shaped the way I wanted and finally used softly Dam Standard and some stitching brush for cloth borders.
As I felt my high poly stage was soon to be finishing. I finally added asymmetry to legs and arms to make her more believable and more interesting to look at. I wanted to make sure that the whole body feels connected yet unique.
Sword
Sword was the only part of Hydra, where I chose to create a hard-surface base in 3ds max. It could have been done in ZBrush as well, but I wanted to make sure that 90 degrees and straightness are at the place before I would manipulate with those.
With a very basic sword from 3Ds Max, I would bring it back to ZBrush to give it very chipped of look thanks to some of my favorite brushes. The sword base has a sci-fi core, but the damage it has is almost ancient, giving it a very strange vibe, which I like a lot.
For dreamcatcher, a regular circle was used with a cylinder. I used CurveTubeSnap to create those hanging splines. MalletFast (or MalletFast2) was used to get that nice chipped of metal effect and, sometimes I would use regular Clay brush for variety. I like to use CurveStrapSnap on many things as well, so it wasn't surprising that I also used it in this project.
In order to get those hanging clothes to fold/hang slightly more realistic, I used Rake brush very softly and with a huge size. Then if I felt like the result was too strong, I would turn the effect down in the layers. And lastly but not least, the fishnet on bag that holds the sword. I simply created texture with a huge amount of dots, used it as a mask, inverted it and then extracted it out. I did the same with a front pocket on Hydra’s right thigh.
Retopology, UV, and Baking
I like to use 3D Coat for retopology. I have been using it since I started working on my first characters 2 years ago, as I always found it very simple and straightforward.
Because Hydra was my project created to challenge me, I decided to try retop in Maya as well. I still did 90% of the difficult retopology in 3D Coat as I am generally faster with it (and automatic at this point), but I am glad I learned something new in Maya. When doing retopology it's important to have very uniformly spread polygons and to keep a generally sweet flow.
Unwrapping was split between 3Dcoat and Maya again (my regular preference would be 3Ds Max, but wanted to go full Maya in this project). Hydra is split into multiple UV sets. Interesting thing is that Hydra’s neck (with cleavage) is not sharing the same UV set as her head like it usually would. It is because the amount of detail in both parts requires them to have their own space.
In order to prepare my already optimized and unwrapped meshes for baking, I would send it to max to use a script that creates smoothing groups from my UV islands. Once smooth groups would be ready I'd send it to Substance Painter, where I would bake my Normal and AO maps. For unique maps like my masks from ZBrush or XYZ maps, I would use Xnormal for baking.
Texturing and Test Lights
My test light setup was already created in marmoset during the highpoly stage. This file would be checked and updated constantly as I kept adding more details. While this light scene was already important in the high poly stage, it would be crucial in this texturing one, since materials in one light setup might not be as interesting as in some other.
When doing base texturing I always make sure to set correct values. They are changed during the process, but my biggest focus usually lies in roughness overall value. It's very important for me to make sure materials differ from each other and don't feel like the same thing.
For the black liquid, I used the previously drawn mask that I made back in ZBrush. I did that by creating a mask, auto unwrapping Hydra and then creating texture-out of that mask which I exported out. This would be baked on from auto unwrapped highpoly Hydra, to my new freshly optimized and unwrapped low poly Hydra in xnormal. Once I used the mask in Substance, I would put some more dirt on top to make it look more convincing and natural. The same technique was used for face liquid.
Light Setup and Hair
The test light scene, in the end, became my final light scene as it was carefully and specifically constructed for Hydra for a long period of time. I wanted to test out more extreme light setups, but in the end, I would always come back to my primary one. So I decided to stick with it till the end.
Hair was done by using XGen. I baked out some hair strands that I felt I might use, combined them together and then started to manually place them where I wanted.
To better describe this process, I would like to recommend this tutorial by Vadim Sorici on Marmoset.
For the posing, I chose to work with ZBrush instead of Max or Maya. I created my own skeleton and gave optimized Hydra a subtle yet adventurous pose. I really like this technique, and I am considering using it more often in future projects.
I would highly recommend this video from Henning Sanden and Morten Jaeger from flipped normals, who describe the process I used to pose Hydra.
For skin, I used this great tutorial by Saurabh Jethani for Marmoset. I would highly recommend it.
In my final light scene, I turned down the sky quite a lot. I use it as a very soft fill light, just so nothing is 100% black. After that, I look for my key light, and then I start lighting up other dark areas. If I feel like I need rim light somewhere I add it. In order to give the scene a bit more dramatic feel, I add some colored lights. I chose a few red ones.
My overall tip when creating a light setup for the character is to just generally try everything until you find your key light. It's great to add some crazy colored sci-fi lights but it's also important that your character is getting the best result of it. As in the end, it's always about your character and all the details you want to show off.
Afterword
Creating Hydra was a huge journey for me, and I am really happy how she has turned out in the end. I learned how to concept, how to translate that concept into 3D, how to sculpt difficult and busy areas. I had a chance to try using XYZ maps, to try hair card workflow and to generally test my skills and make the most of them.
One surprising and important thing that I learned during the process was that you should take some breaks in order to see the problems AND the solutions where they weren't before.
I would like to thank my mom Mariannka, my grandma Marika and my bestie Kilian for supporting me when I was taking on this challenge, and generally for being awesome.
Also huge thanks to Arti and 80 Level for giving me this opportunity to talk about my passion project in this breakdown.
Hope this article was helpful to some people who are also trying to test and improve their skills and good luck with your projects!
Dominika Bariakova, Character Artist
Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev
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