LogInJorge Martinez Garcia walked us through the workflow behind recreating a 2D vampire girl in 3D, which was sculpted in ZBrush, textured in Substance 3D Panter, and rendered in Blender, detailing the shading process and explained how hand-painted textures contribute to a more stylized appearance of the work.
Introduction
Hello everyone! I'm Jorge Martinez Garcia, a 3D Character Artist based in Germany. During my university studies, I stumbled across Blender and got stuck with it. I learned all the 3D skills I have on my own and with the help of online tutorials and courses. Since then, I have incorporated ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter into my workflow as my main tools for creating art.
After graduating, I got my first Job as a 3D Generalist, where I was tasked with creating VFX for High on Life by Squanch Games. Since then, I have been freelancing on multiple projects, doing a wide range of tasks, from generalist 3D modeling to some LookDev and surfacing. Since that time, I have become more interested in surfacing and texture, and I'm looking forward to exploring that area further.
About the Stylized Vampire Girl Project
I was looking for a quick weekend project, and I came across this illustration from Max Grecke. In the beginning, I was planning on just sculpting this quirky character as a sculpting exercise, but I ended up going through the entire process of retopology, texture, and simple animation.
I have been a big fan of Max Grecek's work since I started doing 3D. His shape language is just so "juicy," for a lack of better word. It's also immediately recognizable and super fun to sculpt since he tends to bend anatomy in very appealing forms. In this case, I also liked how the coloring looks very flat at first glance, but it has some nice subtleties, which I wanted to replicate in my own way.
Work on the Face & Head
Like with all my characters, I started blocking out the overall shapes with Primitives in ZBrush, and from there, I pretty quickly got my final sculpture. This time, I put some more emphasis on the eyes and teeth since I knew they were a big focus of this piece. The teeth and eyes are individual meshes, and I kept them like that because I was already thinking that I might want to add some facial expressions later.
Shading
This time, for the texture, I went with a more procedural approach than the one I used in the past, which was very time-consuming. During some explorations for other projects, I came across this project from Jake Benbow.
I really liked the look and workflow he presents here, so I adapted it for my own needs on this character. Since I was interested in achieving a flat-looking coloration but with some subtle variations and details, this was the perfect fit.
Similar to what Jake did for his project, I ended up creating tiling masks. I grabbed some brushes I had in Photoshop, layered some grayscale paint strokes, and added some texture to them. I created a few of these, but this one is the one I ended up the most happy with. I ended up using the same texture in the Curvature/Ambient Occlusion and Roughness channels.
This material is very basic but also very powerful, and I can already see how much mileage you can get from sitting down for an evening and creating a bunch of tile textures for future projects. The best part of this approach is that it still includes some of your own hand-painted "happy mistakes" and imperfections.
Retopology
This time, compared to my last project, I took some more time into retopology and unwrapping because I discovered a bunch of add-ons that make it really easy in Blender.
I mostly used Blender's TexTools and UVPackmaster3 to unwrap and sort the UV islands. It's a bit bothersome having to switch between two add-ons, but this way, you have a really good packing engine with heuristic search and a tool to organize your islands better that gives you a lot of control.
For retopology, I exported Zremeshered meshes from ZBrush, which I had previously prepared, so that the topology didn't have any odd flow.
Texturing
As mentioned before, I used a base material, which helped me achieve the overall look and feel I was aiming for. I didn't want just to recreate Max Greckes's stunning piece but add some more, so I decided to add some more color variations than the original.
After the base colors were dialed in and looked good overall, I started adding some more hand-painted strokes to some areas that felt too flat and boring. I focused a lot on her makeup and, generally, her face. I still used the base smart material there, but with less opacity, so it blends nicely with the hand-painted layers.
For hand painting, I like to use a square brush alpha, reduce the opacity, and flow a tiny bit, leaving it around 70% to 80%. But sometimes, it's worth going lower for some more subtle strokes. Hand painting involves a lot of trial and error and iteration and can be tedious, but it adds so much character to the piece, even if it's only a few brushstrokes here and there.
I am no expert on the matter, but there are a lot of other artists more talented than I who have tutorials and guides out there, so the best thing would be to check these out if you want to look further into hand painting. Jasmin Habezai-Fekri and Sabrina Echouafni are really good at hand painting, and both have resources out there from which to learn!
Rendering
For rendering, I always default to Blender. It's just so easy to set up a few lights and start iterating on the render compared to other software. I tried to match the shadows from the concept piece.
I also wanted to replicate some of the sketch lines, so I used Blender's Grease Pencil to create the sketchy outlines and added some lines here and there to create some nice highlights. There are modifiers to alter the line thickness or make it wobble. I mainly only used the Noise Modifier and animated it, but there are so many other cool things you can do with Grease Pencil, and I'm eager to explore the possibilities.
For composition, I only added a quick color balance and hue correction to tweak the colors a tiny bit more to my liking.
Summary
The initial blockout was done in a few hours, and the final sculpt didn't take that much longer, but I took a three-week break from this project due to work. For the final part of this project, unwrapping, texturing, and rendering took around two days. It could have been done quicker, but I wanted to polish it more than I initially planned.
Figuring out the right settings for Grease Pencil and getting the face rig right was a bit of a challenge since facial proportions don't really fit the mold for most out-of-the-box rigs here. Thankfully, Auto-Rig Pro has a nice facial rig feature that really helped to get it done quicker.
My advice for any beginner out there is to start right now and not wait for that moment of inspiration. Also, work on projects that you want to work on, especially right now, when the entire entertainment industry is crumbling due to layoffs. It's important to find one's own style and not chase after trends or what's considered "employable." Find your own voice.