See How Artist Recreated His Friend's Tabaxi Monk from Dungeons & Dragons Campaign in 3D

Introduction 

Hello, I’m Jaaziah, a 3D Character Artist from Singapore, and I currently serve as 3D Art Lead at Paradoxum Games. I’m deeply passionate about character art and love to push the boundaries of what is possible with my skills and expertise. I first started 3D art 3 years ago when I joined 3dsense Media School in Singapore, where I developed a world-class foundation for my art today.

The Governor, Tabaxi Monk

I grew up heavily influenced by Disney and similar content, and was always fascinated by animals that could walk on two legs and talk. Furthermore, ArtStation has a lack of such characters on the site. My friend Jamie Flack has a Dungeons & Dragons character who is a tabaxi, The Governor, and it perfectly scratched that itch.

As my portfolio had a strong body of sci-fi artwork, I knew that a medieval-themed character would make my portfolio more diverse. Furthermore, Jamie did a fantastic job rendering every part of the character, and that made the illustration an extremely strong piece of reference from the start.

Modeling

I used the traditional workflow of first blocking out low-poly meshes in ZBrush. This allowed me to nail the proportions right before moving on to the high poly stage. Especially important were the leather bandages on his lower arms, where I masked, extracted, and positioned individual meshes. I also used a base mesh for the tabaxi’s head to speed up the blocking out process. 

Once I was satisfied with the proportions, I started giving thickness to leather accessories via ZModeler. ZModeler is very effective in adding trims and thickness to give leather items a good foundation.

I also want to bring attention to the leather padding around the Governor’s legs, as I used a different technique to transfer the positions of the details onto the padding, with Transfer Attributes.

Meanwhile, for the chest armor, there was no special technique to it; it involved extracting, ZRemeshing, and extruding individual leather plates and trims. I used the plugin ExtractPro+ to combine all the above steps into a single action. I highly recommend it as it will speed up your workflow tremendously.

With the props brought to an acceptable level, I moved on to Marvelous Designer to create the fabrics. 

These were mostly basic patterns for the Governor, as I wanted to detail them in ZBrush later, but there were a few patterns that I will highlight. First are the fold patterns. I created the sleeve pattern (1), then a pattern (2) above that wraps around the lower half of (1). For the final pattern, I selected (2) and used Layer Clone Under, which is pattern (3). This gives me the fold pattern that I use for the pants as well.

For the gambeson section of the pants, I simply duplicated that specific part of the pants, extruded them, and applied the Weave pattern in the NoisePlug tab of NoiseMaker. 

Once I have all the fabric patterns in ZBrush, I modify the clothing further, using the Move brush. I mainly look at the silhouettes and see how I can push them to match the concept art better, for example, pushing out the folded areas of the shirt and pants.

To nail the folds perfectly on the sleeves, I cropped out the sleeve in the concept art and made an alpha out of it. This allowed me to apply the folds directly onto the shirt in ZBrush, using DragRect at -100 Focal Shift.

Now that I finally have the high poly done, it’s time to move on to the next stage. 

Topology

A lot of my accessories were modeled in Maya, and the majority of meshes in ZBrush had subdivisions down to the lowest level. For the shirt and pants, I used the meshes directly exported from Marvelous Designer, which retained the UVs. Therefore, I retained the low-poly versions of almost all accessories to skip the retopology process. However, I had to do manual retopology for the Governor’s head, arms, and legs.

I saved a lot of time on this stage simply because I made a tiny bit more effort to keep the low-poly meshes. Hopefully, you can make this a habit too.

Texturing

In the texturing phase, there must be a careful balance of adding enough detail to achieve realism, but not so much that the textures become overly chaotic or noisy. Much attention must be paid to where you want your focal points and areas of rest to be. Subtlety is just as important as detail. 

I slowly built up each material, starting from flat colors, to gradients and color variations that are achieved through masking and generators. However, these variations are subtle, so they don’t overpower the primary colors underneath.

For fur texturing, I referenced a lot of Jamie’s housecat, Reggie, as the Governor is based on his pet. I used a fur alpha and the Follow Path feature so I can paint according to the flow of fur. To make the painted details more prominent, I grouped all paint layers into a single folder and used the Sharpen filter. 

I also decided on a hybrid workflow where I used both texturing and haircards for the fur. The haircards are largely concentrated around the cheeks and ears of the head, as well as the legs and tail. I want to give credit to Jessica “Jincy” Jennings for the fur card set and textures, as I’ve used this pack extensively for my creature works. 

To give the metallic pieces an oily and dirty touch, I use a seamless iridescent texture map and tile it over the metal materials.

I did not manually draw the runes on his combat wraps because I knew I could easily do that in Substance 3D Painter, and it was more non-destructive that way, as we can position the alphas in any way we want. I unwrapped the combat wraps in Maya, ensuring they are completely straight. I then created a paint layer, added the runes alpha in the black mask as a fill layer, and turned tiling off. There are many instances of fill layers, as I did not stack the combat wrap UVs, so I can get as many variations as possible.

The same technique applies to the Governor’s newsboy cap.

In the Marvelous Designer stage, I did not create a pattern for the fly of the pants, so I made the look in Substance 3D Painter. I masked out the fly and applied a height parameter. I also added more details, like frayed strands around the edges, to add more realism to it. It turned out well in the end, so I’m glad.

Lighting & Rendering

I used Unreal Engine 5 to render my beauty shots, not only because of its Path Tracer and fast rendering but also because it’s important to demonstrate my ability to implement characters into a game engine as a game character artist.

What I used was a simple curved backdrop with a 3-point lighting setup, with many smaller lights to complement that 3-point setup. To match the concept, some of the lights’ colors were slightly blue.

I also posed the Governor in various stances, based on the art he has received over the years. I used ZBrush’s Transpose Master plugin for all poses.

Conclusion 

The biggest challenge I had with the Governor was getting his face to a good spot. There was a week where I kept going back and forth between Maya and Unreal Engine 5, adjusting haircards and the geometry of the face so he didn’t look so chubby. I am quite satisfied with the result. 

In the end, I had a lot of fun with the Governor and picked up many new techniques and artistic sense along the way. Special thanks to Jamie for allowing me to turn the Governor into a 3D model and also for giving lots of feedback on the character!

Jaaziah Chan, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins