Alena Shunenkova explained how she created a 3D sculpt of Arcane's Caitlyn, discussing the challenges of modeling the head and the weapon and showing how she captured the hand-painted style of the original character.
Introduction
Hello there! My name is Alena Shunenkova, a self-taught Freelance 3D Character Artist. Getting into 3D was quite unexpected for me, since I only worked as a 2D Artist.
When I was planning to go to university to study game design, I saw a simple 3D character as one of the student projects for admission. It made such an impression on me that I immediately decided to learn 3D and create my own characters. That's when I fell in love with 3D and exploring different characters and art styles.
Arcane is an amazing show with outstanding visual style and characters, so I simply couldn't miss the opportunity to participate in Olya Anufrieva's new Sculptframe challenge. For this project, I chose Caitlyn Kiramman as one of my favorite characters.
My goal was to enhance my skills of hand-painted texturing in Substance 3D Painter, explore the Arcane style more deeply, and try to achieve Caitlyn's look as close to the show as possible.
The Caitlyn Fan Art
I started by gathering different references with official models and concept art, as well as screenshots from the show. I usually use one of the standard Unreal Engine's Metahuman bodies as my base mesh, which has a good topology, UV, and different LODs, so it suits me for any personal project.
I start a block-out in ZBrush, getting the main forms and proportions. After the ZBrush block-out is done, I go to Maya to model additional pieces, replace some parts, and retopologize the clothes. After that, I return to ZBrush, adjust the newly modeled parts, and work on the high-poly.
Caitlyn's head was one of the most difficult parts. I had to redo it and come back to it over and over again throughout the project to get the proportions right.
Caitlyn's rifle was quite challenging to create, as it was my first time creating a weapon, so I used the official renders and colored the main groups to better understand its design.
After that, I modeled almost everything in Maya, except for the symbol on the stock. To create it, I used ZBrush, painted the symbol, extracted it, wrapped it in Maya, and modeled the final look.
UV Unwrapping and Texturing
For topology and UV unwrapping, I also used Maya. As it is a personal project, I didn't really think much about perfect topology and UV, and was more focused on the overall look. Later, some pieces were slightly changed to make the folds more noticeable and improve the silhouette.
After UV unwrapping, I started texturing and creating the hair. I really like how Caitlyn's hairstyle looked at the end of the second season, so I chose it for my project. I used a common workflow for game characters with hair cards.
I created textures in FiberShop. To achieve a more stylized look, I made it thicker and added color variations. Then I used the GS CurveTools plugin to create hair with some adjustments in ZBrush for a more stylized shape.
Texturing is one of the most important steps, as the hand-painted look is one of the main features in the Arcane art style. I used Substance 3D Painter for this part. Before coloring, I painted everything in greyscale, so firstly I filled the main values with base colors, added baked Ambient Occlusion, and used it as a base for further texturing.
There are a lot of different brushes in the program, but personally, I don't really like them for hand-painting, so I import some Photoshop brushes that I use for my 2D projects. Mostly, I used brushes from Aaron Griffin's pack and sometimes changed the alpha for more defined edges. I also used Marc Brunne's brushes to create some folds.
After finishing greyscale, I colored it with a Gradient filter, which works as a Gradient Map in Photoshop, so you can easily adjust the colors.
This was the challenge deadline, but I really wanted to polish and finish the model.
So after the deadline, I took a step back and revised the entire model, adjusted the proportions of the face, clothes, and shoulders, returned to the texturing stage, changed colors, reworked some materials, and added details and imperfections.
The Arcane style has a lot of small details, lines, brush strokes, and color variations on the characters' faces and clothes, especially on metal surfaces, so it was important to go further with texturing, fix materials, and make it closer to the show.
I used almost the same workflow to texture the rifle. Painted everything in greyscale, converted it to a color version using a gradient filter, rendered the materials, and added details.
Rigging and Posing
After everything was done, I used Character Creator for rigging and posing, and then rendered the model in Marmoset Toolbag. For every shot, I rendered albedo, added some metalness to the rifle and clothes parts, and rendered red, green, and blue lighting and rifle lights to have more control over them in compositing.
The compositing was a crucial stage and one of the most challenging for me as I wanted to add volume to the model, but also keep that 2D look. It was the first time I used Nuke, so it was quite difficult, but I really wanted to try.
I imported all renders from Marmoset Toolbag to Nuke, used the Shuffle node to split the RGB lights to separate channels, then adjusted, colored it, and merged it with the albedo render. At the end, I added rifle lights for the glow effect.
After merging and color correction, I also add some sharpening and graininess as a finishing touch. For the backgrounds, I added some textures and vignettes in Photoshop.
Conclusion
In this project, I experimented with various techniques and tried new things and programs to achieve the Arcane art style. Had a lot of fun creating Caitlyn, although it was quite challenging at times, especially with getting the face right and keeping a more 2D look with 3D volumes.
Studying the Arcane style and learning about the creation process behind the show was a great practice and helped me better understand how to achieve a certain look with texturing and compositing, which I can develop further with my future projects.
When you create something, don't be afraid to make a mistake, go back and change things, just keep it up! Experiment with different art styles that inspire you, learn new things, and create characters that you really like.