Recreating Kratos: Texturing & Presentation

Kratos Remastered: About the Project

This project was originally made for the Retrogasm 2019 Competition, organized by Jon Troy Nickel and Layna Lazar. It’s a competition focused on re-imagining characters from video games of the older generation. I am a huge God of War fan, especially God of War 2, so it was a pretty obvious choice for me. Because of the full-time job, I didn’t finish the project in time for the competition, but I wanted to complete it nonetheless.

I approached this artwork the same way I always do - first, I focused on capturing the essence of the character and the concept, which was especially hard since Kratos is so well-established and loved. Then, based on my own taste, I would push and change whatever I thought necessary to bring it to the next level.

I loved every second of the process, but the last 10% were really tough. I had a lot of fun with the presentation and lighting and also loved the challenge of preserving someone’s essence and pushing it to a new level of quality. That was the biggest challenge and, hopefully, successfully achieved.

Objectively, the modeling part was fairly straightforward. If you look at ZBrush sculpt images, they are quite simple. However, I wouldn't say it was easy to model Kratos, mainly because the proportions of the original character are pushed in a fairly exaggerated way, so it was challenging to balance everything to make him more natural and realistic while maintaining the iconic look.

If I was forced to pick one part that was especially important, I'd definitely say that texturing and shading brought the character to the next level. I spent a lot of time trying to balance the values and colors of the armor and convey the warrior feeling with cuts, dirt, scratches, dried blood, etc. I spent a fair amount of time on shading which involved a lot of going back and forth. Since there is not a big variety in materials, I had to put extra care in making the surfaces interesting. I couldn’t just make a metal shader and call it done - it had to tell his story, the Ghost of Sparta’s story, and capture everything he’s been through.

Texturing the Face

I think every character artist will agree that the face is one of the toughest parts of our work. The viewers can always feel when something is off, and even though I’m not trying to achieve hyperrealism, I still wanted Kratos to look convincing and realistic.

Since I wanted to see how much I’ve learned during the past 2 years and apply that knowledge, I did everything from scratch - eyes, shaders, sculpting, everything. Some of the things are simple - the eyes, for example, are nothing new, just geometry, two shaders, etc. What I approached differently was shading and texturing, and I feel the result looks much more natural.

Since I do a lot of skin texturing, clean-up and sculpting at work using a habitual workflow, I wanted to do this part in a different way. I spent most of my time in ZBrush working on a lot of layers of pores, wrinkles, and details - those are really pushed since the SSS softens everything. I used personal alphas, some XYZ alphas and a lot of hand-sculpted details. Then, I used that sculpt to extract every kind of map - cavity, curvature, peaks, valleys, etc. To texture the head, I used Mari. The maps mentioned above made my texturing process extremely simple and clean. I only had to tweak different colors and values until I was happy with the result. The back and forth process took a long time but it was a very fluid way of working.

One tough challenge I faced was the fact that Kratos is covered with ash, so I had to balance how the skin behaved in terms of subsurface and specular where the ash was heavy or subtle. One of my main references was the Kratos made by Rafael Grassetti and Santa Monica Studio. I studied it to see how they handled that part and tried to keep the look as balanced as they did. But since Kratos is not a regular human, a lot of the decisions concerning the look of the skin and behavior of the surface were just my personal preferences.

As for the skin, the great results were actually achieved thanks to Marmoset Toolbag! I’ve been using Toolbag for a while now and I absolutely love the improvements they’ve been adding to the software. The skin shader options plus the rendering, GI, secondary reflections, etc have been absolutely fantastic to play with.

I worked on the skin the same way I usually do - good diffuse map, simple specular, roughness using cavity, all of these taken from the sculpt. But it was the shader itself that made it look the way it does. When working in Toolbag, it's important to make sure you are using the correct scale, because if not the SSS and Translucency won't work properly.

After I made all textures, it was a matter of going back and forth to make sure the values for the SSS, the specular and the roughness were balanced and worked properly with the whole character and the lighting.

I have nothing against tweaking things in post-process, but for this project, almost everything was done inside Toolbag. I pushed the bloom a little, made sure the lighting was enhancing the colors and used a small amount of DOF to add that depth and separate the ears from the eyes which adds a lot, in my opinion.

Texturing Props

All the props and clothing were textured in Substance Painter. I really like that software, especially for real-time projects.

The way approached it was also very straightforward. First, I gathered the references for the look I wanted to get or the main direction in which the shading was going to go. Once I established that I did a blocking pass - a very simple version of the shaders, rough metal, cloth, leather, etc. This was done to simply get a visual representation of each material and values. It's very important to set apart each shader to differentiate how the surfaces behave.

Once that is done, I start laying down the first passes of details, rough patches, age discoloration, scratches, dents, etc. I spent a big amount of time here adding all the layers that tell the story of the character. I made sure that everything was there for a reason - Kratos is a warrior and his accessories must convey that. Even though the process itself was fairly simple, it took a lot of time to make the materials not only readable but also balanced in terms of values and saturation. The shading also needed to behave in a realistic manner, and, more importantly, support the character as a whole.

It's quite hard to pick the most enjoyable piece but as a big fan, I loved doing Athena’s Blades of Chaos. They are so iconic and doing the shader for the iridescent glow was a real treat for my inner gamer, as well as a great exploration of shaders in Toolbag.

Lighting

Presentation was something I really wanted to focus on in order to improve my understanding of rendering and lighting, whether it's real-time or not.

For this project, I knew I wanted a rather simple/studio lighting approach to showcase the model. At the same time, I also wanted to test if I could create an illusion of Kratos being somewhere in a battle - after all, he is the God of War.

For the studio lighting renders, I used a simple setup: main light, soft rim light, and strong rim light to create dramatism. The fill light is the sky HDR from Toolbag, in this case, a very dark and subtle one. The render settings are really simple - a little bit of vignette, sharpen and bloom, and small DOF to add depth. For me, lighting is about achieving a certain goal. My goal, in this case, was to showcase my project as a portfolio piece as well as accentuate the dramatic feeling of Kratos’ persona. He is a very intense character and I wanted to show that.

For the “battle/fire” scene, I wanted to get more cinematic lighting. I tried a bunch of different ways to show that - moonlit, lit by a fire inside a house, etc. In the end, I thought that the most logical option for the God of War would be the burning remains of a village or the aftermath of a fight. With that in mind, I searched for an image to use as a background (I used the backdrop option for the camera in Toolbag). Once that was done, I used two backlights to make the character and the environment cohesive (orange-tinted), then placed a subtle blue-toned main light and a red fill, used for both sides of the face respectively. I cranked up the bloom and the DOF to get a more dramatic feeling. After that, I added the blurred embers in the foreground in Photoshop and called it done.

It is worth mentioning that I followed the well-known principle of lighting per shot. That means every time my camera has a different angle my lighting changes slightly, always following the same goal.

It was an extremely rewarding experience and definitely something I want to dig in deeper. It showed me how much you can really push a piece if you put in the effort and the time.

Alvaro Zabala, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev