Modeling and Texturing a Stylized Hand-Painted 3D Girl Model

Introduction

Hi, I'm Selman Bernis, from France, 22 years old. I'm currently a student in the Game Art Master program at New3dge. Since my childhood, I have always been interested in art, especially comics and manga. That's where my artistic journey began.

I started 3D at New3dge. At first, I was mostly interested in concept art, but when I discovered sculpting, I fell in love with the way I could play with forms and shapes. It really feels like 2D sketching. For me, it was a new way to express myself and create what I wanted, with everything becoming much clearer and more precise in 3D space.

I'm still a student, so for now I haven't contributed to any major projects. However, last year, I worked on a group project with my classmates, where I was in charge of designing and sculpting two creatures. If you're interested, you can check out the project here.

This was an assignment for New3dge from last year, under the supervision of Adrien Simon (an amazing teacher who taught me a lot). The main goal was to create a 3D model based on a 2D illustration and make it as accurate as possible.

For me, it was one of my first stylized characters, so I needed to use a lot of references from existing artworks to understand how to stylize my shapes properly. I was mostly inspired by the work of Thibaut Granet and Kirill Senzu. My focus was to achieve a clean and dynamic sculpt, even though it was an unlit render, because I wanted to get more comfortable with sculpting in ZBrush and improve my understanding of shape simplification and stylization.

It wasn't a project focused on game optimisation, but rather a training piece to improve my sculpting skills and create a strong final render (almost like an illustration). I was a bit afraid at first, because when you're a beginner, breaking symmetry and sculpting directly in a dynamic pose feels uncomfortable and stressful. But it helped me gain confidence in my skills and taught me a lot.

The Pouring Dreams Project

I started this project from a basic sphere in ZBrush and made a very quick blockout, placing all the main volumes and trying to match the concept from every angle. It's really important at this stage to capture the vibe of the character using the simplest shapes possible.

I try to place as many elements as possible early on, so I have the minimum amount to add later. I started pushing the sculpt. After that, it's mostly about refining, tightening the shapes, and matching the concept more accurately.

After this step, I started posing the character using the splash art as a reference. It was a very dynamic pose, and I wanted to keep that same energy from the concept. So I made a first quick version using only the references on my PureRef.

I used the T-Pose Mesh feature, a ZBrush plugin that merges all your subtools into one so you can make changes to the whole model at once. It's really useful to keep your workflow flexible.

Something I love to do while I'm working is take screenshots, bring them into Photoshop, and draw the outline of my character to see how the silhouette and negative space work together. After that, I do a paintover on top of the first drawing to fix all the issues (you can also do the same with the Liquify tool in Photoshop). Then I just go back to ZBrush to fix the 3D.

Once the blockout is finished, it's time for the refinement phase. I don't have many screenshots of this part, but here are some of the main things I used to achieve this result. For the clothes and props, I simply followed the splash art and tried to keep the same volumes.

For the anatomical parts, it was the same approach, except I kept human anatomy in mind and used a lot of simplified anatomy references, as well as stylized anatomy references.

Especially for the face, I needed to deform the volumes a bit to get a more accurate result that matched the concept.

For these parts, which have several shapes that are very similar, I used this:

And here is the final sculpt!:

Texturing and Rendering

My texturing was done using ZColor in ZBrush. With ZColor, I simply picked colors from my concept and painted my model, using the skin shade shader for the base and the flat color shader for refinement to achieve the best unlit result possible.

For the final render, I used Marmoset Toolbag 4. I started from the amazing scene by Gianluca Squillace, edited it to fit my needs, redid the lighting, and adjusted the clay material.

At first, I set up my lighting using a gray shader without SSS to see what I was doing. It's a simple three-light setup with a colored rim light to lift some of the shadows.

The post-process didn't require many modifications. I just adjusted the contrast and exposure to match the colors of my references.

Conclusion

I wasn't especially confident at the beginning of the project, because working directly in a pose can be a bit confusing when you're not comfortable with it. But working on it helped me get past those mental blocks we often have with sculpting. It made me much more at ease with asymmetry, letting go, and trusting my process.

I think we all tend to put too much pressure on ourselves when sculpting, being afraid to change things or push shapes further. But it's better to see the whole thing as a living process. The more you work on it, the better it becomes, and there are always ways to go back if needed, like using layers or incremental saves.

What matters is not putting artificial barriers on yourself and not being afraid to explore ideas during the process. Letting go of that fear unlocked a lot for me in 3D. I'm still a beginner in the 3D world, but if I had one piece of advice, it would be not to hesitate to try things that scare you. It helps you understand your level better, but also teaches you a lot along the way.

Selman Bernis, Character and Props Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine