Recreating Arcane's Jinx and Silco With ZBrush, Maya & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Darina Yevstigneeva, I'm a 3D Artist from Ukraine. How I got into 3D art? Well, that's actually a funny story! I've been drawing for all my life, on the sheet of paper with pencils or on the canvas with paints. One day my mother said: "Hey! Why don't buy you a graphics tablet?" My immediate answer was "No, I don't need it, I draw once a year". My mother replied "not a big deal, so you will draw on the tablet once a year". I said "I don't need such an expensive toy". But my mother already decided that I will have it for sure, eventually she bought me a graphics tablet.

So I drew a few portraits on this tablet and the next step of my mother was: "Hey! There is a friend of yours, she does something with the 3D graphics, ask her about it". I was like: "Ask what?", and my mother said: "Just ask." So I did, and this friend of mine gave me a link to the online 3D course, and my mother said: "We are buying it."

So that's how I got into 3D! I'm so happy that my mother saw the potential in me, I never could imagine that my hobby would become my job someday, thanks to my mother!

A bit about my experience in the 3D sphere for now: I finished 2 online courses. One was about ZBrush only. The other course was about making a stylized game ready character where we learned the whole pipeline, from sculpt to animation. And that's it. That is my whole experience, only two online courses, and after completing them, I decided to make my first big project on my own.

The Jinx and Silco Project

I discovered Arcane for myself only in October 2022. Words can not describe how I liked this masterpiece, starting from the script and ending with their art style. And, besides that, we really like movies when we see ourselves in some movie characters, right? Same thing is here. Long story short, I fell in love with Jinx and Silco. I have to practice my 3D skills, so why don't make them in 3D?

So, let's proceed to the process itself. I managed to find some screenshots that I made while I was working on this project. And if you're a beginner and you don't know body anatomy, face anatomy, proportions, you don't know where and how to start (like me), the best advice I can give you is not to panic. The key is to take lots of references (of one particular character or object) and be patient. Sit and try to recreate it. It will not be perfect right away, just look at how my Jinx looked when I was sculpting her:

Pathetic, right? As you can see, I tried to draw guidelines and see my mistakes, tried to see what was wrong with her face.

As I already said, the key to success is to have many different references from different angles and perspectives, and always draw guidelines on the references and your 3D models! They do help a lot!

For her braids, I used a free brush, you can download it here.

When I sculpted Silco's face, I was pretty okay with it at the beginning, but when I looked at it after a few days, I saw that I completely messed it up. So, another key to success is to let your eyes have a rest from your work, when you're working for too long you stop seeing your mistakes, better leave your project for a day or two, when you come back to it you will see everything that you need to fix, here is Silco before and after I gave myself a rest:

It looks like in the first picture he got bitten by bees, doesn't it? By the way, I sculpted his scar using free brushes from the "Orb Brush Pack". You can download them here, very useful! During the whole process of sculpting, I only used Move, Clay BuildUp, and Dam Standard brushes.

Modeling the Bodies and Outfits

Their bodies and outfits were modeled with lots of pain and suffering, as it is my first own project after the courses so no teacher could help me. I was telling to myself: "You should make it somehow, it doesn't matter which instruments and techniques to use, doesn't matter how much time you're going to spend on this, it just has to look good in the end". And the same thing I'm telling you right now. There are no correct or wrong techniques for how to do it. It doesn't matter. What matters is the result. So, speaking about bodies, it's pretty simple, watch on YouTube how to make a standard male and female stylized bodies, sculpt them, repeat every step from the video, and after you have your base meshes, just take lots of references and just copy their proportions, just try to catch the shape of their bodies.

Maybe it was not the fastest way to make clothes, but I did it the best I could. So first, mask the area where you want your clothes to be, then use the "extract" button.

And after that, comes the funniest part. You should use everything that you know in this program, to make it look good, use the Move brush, use ZRemesher and play with its parameters, in the Deformation section, use all the different kinds of Polishes, use ZModeler, add polygons, delete polygons, extract polygons, add loops, use Orb brushes, draw folds on the clothes, don't forget to always look at the original (at the references), make everything that you can do to make the clothes look good, there's no particular pipeline I can give to you, as I'm only the beginner myself, just try to make it look good in any way possible! That is how I was making it.

Unwrapping the Models

Since I did not plan to animate them, I just used ZRemesher topology. I also tried AutoUnwrap in ZBrush, but seams on the model appeared to be in the most inappropriate places, so I had to jump into Maya to make all the seams from scratch. Also, the program doesn't know which shells on the UV you want to be bigger, and which ones to be smaller, because, if nobody will ever see the inner side of Jinx's pants, or Silco's shirt, why should it take place on the UVs, right? So I put and resized every single shell manually.

Also, if there was a possibility to straighten some shells, I always did, because in such a way we save more space on the UVs and it will be easier to work with these shells in the future while texturing the model:

The Texturing Workflow

Texturing. Many people already asked me how I did texturing, whether I took some courses or used tutorials? And the answer is "no". We come back to my favorite thing and this is references. Lots and lots of screenshots from Arcane. And you copy from them. There is no particular secret in my hand painted project. I only used two kinds of brushes, here they are:

• Knife Painting Heavy is perfect for texturing organic surfaces and especially faces:

• Basic Hard was especially good for overlining Jinx's tattoos:

There is one thing I can suggest you before starting to hand paint your model, always add to every single layer generator Light in the beginning. It will help you decide where the shadows will be, and it will give you a better "raw" model with which you will work.

By the way, after I textured four of Jinx's weapons, I got an idea of how to texture metal in Arcane style and it became much easier for me to texture different metal parts in Jinx's and Silco's clothes. When you copy something, you start to remember it, and after some time you will be able to texture models without references, because you will already have plenty of experience after copying from professional models.

Creating the Weapons

Speaking about Jinx's weapons, I also modeled them in ZBrush and textured them in Substance 3D Painter. For her weapons, I used two brushes – Basic Hard and Basic Soft. As I was texturing metal, I needed more sharp edges of the brush, Knife Painting Heavy just could not manage with texturing metal. As I already mentioned it above, it was good for texturing organic surfaces.

Rendering and Lighting

For rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag. You can see that there are just a few lightning sources. The main light comes from the "Sky", two rim lights (blue and orange), and one soft light to reduce some dark shadows. And for each scene, for each render, these light sources are almost identical, no complex light schemes. 

For some of my renders, I used Photoshop afterward. For example for this render where they are together, I drew background and smoke around them:

Overall, this whole project took me five months. Challenges were on each stage of this project. I mean, you saw their faces at the very beginning! But the result was worth it! As I am a beginner artist myself, I probably won't be able to give you a proper advice, but i just want to say – nothing comes easy, work hard and it will always pay off, develop your skills, practice, practice, practice. Don't be scared to begin. Don't give up if your work doesn't look the way you wanted it to look. Try again, give it a break for a few days or try to make something simpler.

"Power, real power, doesn't come to those who were born strongest, or fastest, or smartest. No. It comes to those who will do anything to achieve it."

Darina Evstigneeva, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie