If a Flower Had a Face: Making a Dandelion Character

Life Updates

Since the last time we spoke in 2016, I’ve been fortunate to be part of the release of Total War: Warhammer 2 as well as a ton of DLC projects. In terms of personal art, since working on Terry, my pace of 3D character creation has somewhat slowed down as I am now focusing more on concepting and art direction in general, however, I did work on some awesome creatures for Warhammer 2 (namely the War Mammoth and the Necrosphinx which is my overall favorite piece from the game).

Dandelion is the first character I have worked on from start to finish for a long time!

Idea Behind the Project

Originally, I planned to create a small game prototype in Unreal 4, focused on terrariums and the small creatures that live in them. I realized, however, that this would cost a substantial amount of time, so I focused on developing a single character from the series instead (basically, the one I liked the most).

The two most important parts of the design for all the characters in the intended universe was to ensure that they integrated some sort of floral element (which they ended up being named after) and that their clothes and accessories represented their scale. If you have ever seen such movies as ‘The Borrowers’ and ‘Arrietty’ then you will understand what I mean. The characters are only a few inches high, so the objects they use (and their construction) should reflect their scale and proportions (for example, a sword would be represented by a sewing needle).

Initial Sculpting

In terms of sculpting, the process is fairly straightforward. First, I generally block everything out using a combination of 3ds Max and ZBrush. I use a fairly traditional workflow combining those two programs for the sculpting/hard-surface stage. I know a lot of artists are transitioning to ZBrush for hard-surface work (using ZModeller), however, I still prefer to use a hybrid 3ds Max/ZBrush approach, building the core shapes in 3ds Max and then using ZBrush booleans and ZRemesher/ZProject to create a clean base mesh which I can sculpt on.

The blockout helps me to nail the proportions of the character and in my opinion, it's is the most important part of the sculpting process as it provides the foundation of your character. Without a good blockout, you could spend months sculpting a character and the proportions will be completely inaccurate (and that will only cost you more time). Really nail that initial base.

After that, it’s a combination of sculpting and Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer has always been one of my weak points so I wanted to spend a bit of time in it (especially for the backpack and scarf).

The fur from the final ZBrush renders are all placeholders - they give me a feel as to how I want the final game-ready character to look like. I created the fur using FiberMesh and reused some of its elements when I baked down my alpha cards for the low poly version.

Cloth Accessories

Focusing on the backpack, I was originally unsure as to how I was going to make it. I figured it would be an interesting challenge to try and make it all in Marvelous Designer, so that’s pretty much what I did. First, I constructed the pattern for the backpack in Marvelous to get the overall mass, then I imported an object from 3ds Max which would act as the filling for the bag. In order to get the folds right, I wanted to ensure that there was some sort of gravity acting on the bag internally (which is what the filling would do).

The stitches on the backpack were created using a curve brush in ZBrush. I created a simple stitch in 3ds Max, exported it to ZBrush and then created an ‘InsertMesh’ brush. Using the curve settings, I could create a brush that can be dragged over a surface and then tweaked using the ‘Move’ brush.

The benefit of using a separate mesh for your stitches as opposed to sculpting them in is that it’s much easier to separate them on your texture (using an ID map). By giving them a different ID color, you can assign a different texture to them in Substance Painter easily (as opposed to manually painting it in).

The rolled-up blanket at the top was a different story. In order to get that working successfully, I had to create a long strip of fabric and then manually roll it in Marvelous Designer to achieve the effect (there is a good tutorial for that below):

Texturing

The workflow for texturing was also standard, I used Substance Painter. On most of the materials, I tried to keep the details quite subtle. To really push the fur and translucent effects as much as I could, I relied on the subsurface scattering and fuzz effects in Marmoset Toolbag.

I’m a big fan of subtlety in textures and I use material and color definition as a way to lead the viewer's eye to the areas that deserve the most attention. In this case, yellow buttons on the character's boots and purple leggings lead the viewer's eye to the head (using the scarf as a catalyst).

Hair

The hair was actually quite simple to make but it took much time to put everything together. I did some prototyping with the shape and length (it all comes back to ensuring the original base mesh had correct proportions). Once I knew how long I wanted each stem to be, I just built one and then duplicated and placed the stems manually (the ends are alpha cards, similar to the fur to save on the triangle count).

The fuzzy-looking effect comes from blurring the alpha a little bit as well as using the fuzz settings in Marmoset Toolbag. Altogether, I feel the effect came out quite well.

Challenges

Honestly, I think the biggest challenge for this project was less about the technical side and more about the time and patience it took to complete. Unfortunately, I have less time to work on something at home these days and Dandelion ended up taking a substantial amount of it. I did take long breaks during major milestones so that I could go back to the character with fresh eyes.

Baj Singh, Character Art Lead at Creative Assembly

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev