Making Cat Mecha & Engineer Using ZBrush, Maya & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

Oksana Vinogradova: Hello, my name is Oksana, I am a freelance 3D character artist. Before introducing the 3D world, I worked in 2D, mostly with photography. Despite my good results, I was thinking of being realized in 3D, which is my old dream. So I started self-education with Autodesk Maya. I soon realized that I need to get systematic knowledge and I took a game graphics course. I fell in love with sculpting in ZBrush, so things went well and began to bring joyfulness. The education expanded my horizons, how huge it is. Also, it broadened my list of useful software and helped me to assemble puzzle pieces together.

After studying, I did some projects for my soul and portfolio. My first commercial work was a character for Catacomb Crawlers. At the moment I am working on another project.

One of the benefits of visiting schools is communication. Once my colleague Niсk said that he found an interesting art and wants to make a mecha (he likes hard surface modeling), but there is also a human character (I like to sculpt organics). He said that I would like it and sent me that art. Of course, he was right, I really like this girl and also the combination of human and robot. Many thanks to Rich Carey for his awesome work!

Besides the impressive art, there were some other things that attracted me, it was a challenge for me because of the many clothes, a complicated haircut, an expressive face, and graphic style.  Also, I wanted to add Marvelous Designer to my pipeline and to try to render in Unreal Engine keeping the style of the author. 

Nikita Petrov: Hi, my name is Nick. I am a 3D Environment/Level Artist. I have liked 3D modeling and games since my university days. I graduated as an engineer and always enjoyed modeling devices and machinery parts in 3D using CAD software. But I always looked at 3D art of games and movies and wanted to try something not so engineering and scientific. I wanted to build new worlds, vehicles, and buildings, something I could see in my favorite games.

With these thoughts in mind, I started self-learning polygonal modeling and texturing for games. It wasn't too tough as there are many tutorials and learning sites available these days. But at some point, I decided that I wanted to work in the industry, so I went to school to study computer graphics and connect with people from the industry who share my passion for games and 3D. There, I met Oksana and we stayed friends and even became colleagues for this project.

Today, I have one released PC/Console project as a level artist, and I am now working as an environment artist in mobile games. In my spare time, I continue to improve my skills and learn new pipelines and techniques in environment, hard surface, and level art.

In this Mecha project, we had lessons in hard surface characters at school. I chose this mecha concept by Rich Carey as my project, but my tutor said it would be too difficult for me. So, the mecha stayed in my backlog for a while. At last, Oksana and I made this cute pair of characters here.

The Engineer

Oksana Vinogradova: I started by preparing references.

They helped me to understand different body types, their proportions, and the techniques of drawing faces, especially the eyes.

Modeling

The model is made in ZBrush from base mesh to high-poly. The engineering tools were made in Maya.  

For sculpting, I always use the reference image added to SpotLight. I use polypaint to make the model more similar to the original. 

Her features and general form are a large head and huge, serious eyes. I always draw irises when I make eyes. After that, it becomes clear whether the shape of the eyelid is correct or not. Sometimes, I looked too long at the concept and lost the ability to view it. Then I would go away for an hour or a day, and when I came back, I would see things I hadn’t noticed.

Step by step I made her face more detailed and added the accessories.  

To make her hair, I separated the hair growth zone into different areas and made a blockout of hair strands using different hair brushes. I achieved the best result with DE HairTubes Brush by Dylan Ekren. Also, I used ZModeler for each hair strand.

When the body was ready, I made an avatar for Marvelous Designer by exporting her model from ZBrush with a low level of subdivs.

I sewed several versions of her dress and increased the fabric density for the apron and collar. I chose a skirt with fewer pleats.

Before exporting the .obj, after the final simulation, I removed some seams and increased particle distance to get fewer artifacts. Then I imported it to ZBrush.

I saved each detail in a separate subtool and polygroups. I got a satisfactory topology using ZRemesher and sculpted clothes to get a more stylized look. 

After the high poly was ready, I started to make retopology and UV unwrapping.

For me, this process looks like meditation, especially hair. I use the quad draw tool in Maya. For optimization, I decided to use two texture sets. At this stage (low poly without textures), I tested the model in AccuRIG. 

I do baking in Marmoset Toolbag, it is very convenient for this.

Substance 3D Painter is useful for making albedo, roughness, and metallic texture maps. 

I use the albedo map for hand painting in 3DCoat. It was a new pipeline for me, where both PBR and hand painting were used.

Special attention was paid to making the face skin tones and her eyes.

Rigging

Usually, I do rigging and skinning in Maya manually or using the Advanced Skeleton. But this time I decided to try ActorCore AccuRIG, which allows making rigs and skin automatically by exporting the result to Maya or Unreal Engine. 

Lighting

I wanted to make a model with a game-ready look and used Unreal Engine to test this.

In the first scene, I wanted to keep the resemblance to the original art. There used only two sources of light – directional light is the key light and spot light is used to make the resulting light warmer.

I used a post-process material made with Evans' Bohl tutorial to make an outline.

It is interesting to see characters in a dark scene. The whole scene was illuminated by spot lights using a classical colorful blue red contrast light scheme. Toon shaders are not used there, but I made a material with low roughness to add reflections on the backdrop.

It's very cool when our work gives us pleasure. All we need is to keep taking at least one small step every day and when we look back after a while, we will see our progress. I wish all of you not to deviate from the path, rejoice at the successes achieved and move on to your dream.

The K-1TTY Mecha

Nikita Petrov: As a Blizzard, Overwatch, and Heroes of The Storm fan, I found in this K-1TTY concept a great opportunity to try myself in stylized hard-surface modeling of an interesting and a little bit organic mecha, trying to implement PBR workflow instead of hand painting. 

Blocking

My first step was to block out the mesh as close to the original concept as possible. It is great that the side view of K-1TTY was added to the concept, so it was easy to align parts together.

I started blocking in Maya, created cubes, and subdivided those twice. It is a very useful and fast method for making base organic shapes of this mech. I used it on every big part of the mech body and for further tweaking the shapes of the details on the surface. After blocking all the big parts, I started blocking medium and small parts using standard polygonal modeling techniques. 

Every time I added a new part to block out, I tried to check the whole model silhouette. Sometimes 3D models and concept art do not match in proportions or some parts are too big for mecha to move. In that case, I prefer to make some adjustments to sizes and shapes even if it does not correspond to the concept. But carefully, without big changes in the whole idea of the concept. It is much easier to do it if you have a connection with a concept artist or with your lead, which I didn't have.

Also, I had some troubles and spent a lot of time thinking out parts that are not shown in concept art like leg and arm mechanisms. So I preferred to look at already working designs from Overwatch and some mechs from other projects. I tried to achieve a believable and simplistic stylized look of robot parts that work in the legs and arms.

Boolean and Paneling Big Parts

Because the mech has both organic and rounded parts, I decided to make them in ZBrush with the use of Booleans. I imported blockout meshes to ZBrush and remeshed them for better polygon spread. In Maya, I created simple cutters (boxes with rounded corners) and imported them too.

As a result, I had all meshes with necessary holes and cut edges, and all cut surfaces have a unique polygroup. These polygroups are perfect for making Panel Loops to create interesting details on the surface.

High Poly

After completing all the work in ZBrush, I exported all decimated high poly meshes back to Maya. The next part was to create medium size parts and take them to place. To make work easier, I separated legs and arms, made instances of them, and put them in place. With this setup, I could model the parts in world coordinates and look at the final result in the mech.

For further posing and checking the ability to move, all of the parts of the arms and legs had a hierarchy. So if I move a parent part, all children meshes will move with it without changing coordinates.

Low Poly

Making the low poly mesh, I started with the retopology of decimated parts I made in ZBrush. For this purpose, I used the Quad Draw tool in Maya. I started to make the polycount as low as possible but also tried to save the round silhouette of parts. And because I use this mech only in my portfolio and for practice, I have a higher limit for polycount and didn’t worry about it.

For optimization, I tried to make the mesh denser at parts that would make the silhouette and made polygons bigger inside the mesh.

UVs and Separating Materials

For this work, I decided to divide the mesh into 4 materials or regions in UV space, which I could make as atlas or as separated materials for the weapons, body, and backpack. I packed each part of the mech in squares and rectangles. Each weapon and body itself was mirrored for saving space in UV.

Baking and Texturing

The baking process was conducted in Marmoset Toolset 3, and the main reason was Skew Painting in it. I used it to set the normal of the bake perpendicular to the surface to achieve the desired look of the bake.

The final look of some baked low poly parts with a normal map:

In texturing I used SoMuchMaterials, the SoMuchRoughness preset allows me to make a simple but cool-looking stylized look. I also used the Baked Diffuse Light filter in Substance 3D Painter to make more depth.

Small details were added by height alphas by JRO Tools because it’s simpler to control the number and spot additional details.

The paint pattern, dirt, and damaged edges were made with masks with the addition of many paint layers to eliminate undesirable parts of the mask.

It is cool to add some life and history to a model by adding tear and wear in parts that are used often or, like in this case, powder dirt on a tip of a gun.

I always like to use a down-to-up gradient to fit the model with the environment, especially with stylized ones. It makes a subtle shadow from the ground, which helps to believe that the mecha stands on the ground instead of just floating. 

In the end, I added decals on another small atlas and used mesh decals to place it on the model. It was done to make the text not shown as mirrored on one side of the mech. And it allows us to use different decals to customize the robot in the future. As a finishing touch, I made an atlas for visor images with different states of mech according to the concept art. 

It was a cool opportunity to make something that I like in 3D and also to practice in a new style and pipeline. I am continuing to improve my skills and techniques in different kinds of 3D art and hope you found something interesting in my part of this project.

Thanks for the opportunity to show my working process and I am glad to be in touch through my ArtStation page. I also have other humble projects there I'd like you to see. Feel free to message me, I'll be happy to answer your questions.

Oksana Vinogradova, 3D Artist

Nikita Petrov, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Burton