The Undead Knight: Turning a 2D Concept into a 3D Sculpt

Introduction

My name is Cole Henry-Mashuga, and I am currently working as a Character Artist in the video games industry at Blind Squirrel Games. Specifically, I am working on State of Decay 3 as a co-dev for Undead Labs. I have also previously contributed to Star Vault's Mortal Online 2 as a Weapon Artist.

I have been into art and video games since I was a child. I always gravitated towards art, which included taking art classes throughout middle and high school and spending a lot of my free time making drawings of Master Chief, Link, random Pokémon, and everything else I was into at the time. When I eventually decided to go to college, I decided to lean into my talents and attend the Art Institutes International of Minnesota, where I majored in Media Arts & Animation.

A lot of my inspiration and interest in character art originally came from, and still comes from, movies, video games, and other artists' work. I loved watching behind the scenes and the making of video games. I distinctly remember watching the documentary on the making of Halo 2, and I think that is where it clicked that real people make these games and that it was possible to get into this industry.

My skillset as a base came from school, but after graduating, I realized I still had a lot of work to do to develop as an industry-level character artist. So after leaving school, everything I learned became self-taught through books and tutorials. YouTube and sites like Cubebrush.co, Vertex School, and GumRoad were huge resources for me to hone my skills and to learn the entire game art pipeline.

However, I think some of the most impactful post-educational moments in terms of my growth as an artist have come from participating in hands-on mentorships/workshops with Glauco Longhi, Andrew Ariza, and Raf Grassetti.

Additionally, advice and help from artists in the industry, like Mike Haney, have helped me grow as an artist not only in an artistic sense, but in the technical side of the work at my current job as a Character Artist. The person I contribute my most growth to is a great artist named Ackeem Durrant, who took me under his wing after I enrolled in his class at Vertex School on building character for games.

He helped me get my first break in the industry and continues to help me hone my talent as an artist through and through. I have been lucky to have great mentors as I continue to develop my skills as an artist in the gaming industry.

The Undead Knight

The Undead Knight project started in a mentorship with Raf Grassetti. I am always looking to expand my skill set as an artist, so I jumped at the opportunity to learn from the best. Based on this wonderful experience, I recommend people to join mentorships, if it's affordable to do so, to get one-on-one feedback from a professional in the industry.

As with most of my projects, I always work with references, and I think it is great for every artist, at all levels, to do the same. I use an app called PureRef, which allows me to place my concept in the middle and then break out all of the elements separately and put a note above each category. I believe it's always a good idea to find real-world/high-level sculpted references.

The real-world references are used as the main source to use when building a character, and the sculpted references are used as a level of quality you are looking to hit. Another thing I also focus on is lighting, mood, and overall quality bar references as metrics I want to achieve for the final product.

Lastly, when I'm nearing the end of each phase of the character art pipeline (sculpting, texturing, look dev, etc.) I like to put my work side by side in my PureRef file with a high-quality reference so that I can see if my work is on the same level. If that standard of quality is not met, I will go back and make adjustments until it is.

When it comes to things that don't exist in the real world, like a dragon, I try to get the closest applicable reference I can get, like any sort of reptile anatomy, just as long as it makes sense for the design and could logically operate. For my dragon, I incorporated some quadruped anatomy, such as dogs and cats, but in a functional way.

My modeling process is pretty straightforward and stays in ZBrush unless there is something hard-surface that I can model faster in Maya. In fact, a majority of the high-poly stayed in ZBrush. For the main character, it started with a human male base mesh.

I prioritized getting the proportions correct, so I broke down how many heads tall the character is in the concept, and answered the question: Is it more heroic style proportions or more realistic?

After this was sorted out, I got my base mesh proportional to the concept, mainly just adjusting things with the Move brush. Then I jumped into sculpting his head/skull right on the base mesh to start blocking it out. Once this was in a decent place, I used the mask/extract method to start blocking out all of the pieces that are a part of his body (Armor/Gloves/Pants/etc).

For example, to do the shoulder pad, I masked off the area of the base mesh in the shape of the piece I intend to make, then extracted it with 0 thickness, followed by a deformation>polish, which smoothed out the rough edges. At this point, I used ZRemesh to achieve a pretty low-poly count to get a cleaner topology to work with. This process made it easier to produce big, clean forms.

Then, using ZModeler, I added thickness, fixed any topology, created a polygroup around the perimeter, extruded that, and then I creased all the hard edges and subdivided them. I rinsed and repeated this process for all of the pieces on the character.

Once I had them all blocked out, I adjusted them all to be proportionate to the concept, keeping in mind the silhouette from all angles. From here, I sculpted in detail, further fleshing out every part, starting from a low subdivision, then refining the forms as I subdivide up, until getting a polished/final result.

I then started working on the model overall. I do this with my main three brushes: Move, Clay Tubes, and Dam Standard. When doing armor, I also used Trim Dynamic to get clean planes. I used a few more, but these are the main ones.

The Armor

To get the armor pieces cleaned, I used a combination of Sculpting/ZRemesher/ZModeler. For example, with the main armor piece, when I had this single piece mesh sculpted up with all of the detail and forms, I started splitting apart all of the ornamental pieces and cleaning them up one by one. You can see the process in the GIF below:

Once I had a relatively clean mesh, I added some clean raised edges to the body and arm cavities. To do this, I masked out a ring around the bottom cavity and the hole of the arm, then I polygrouped them so I could get a clean edgeloop.

I followed up this process with ZRemesh, utilizing the button "Keep Groups" on, and the polygon count was pretty low. This provided an edgeloop around the whole piece for both of these areas. I then used ZModeler to give the entire mesh thickness using Extrude>All Polygons.

Afterward, I extruded the polygroups around the arm and body holes to raise those edges using Extrude>Polygroup All. Finally, I used the crease function for any edges that I want to keep sharp. To complete the process, I then subdivided, which ultimately resulted in a clean mesh.

Below you can see the evolution of starting with a base mesh, all the way to the finished high-poly sculpt.

For the dragon, it was all done organically. I started from a sphere using Dynamesh, pushing and pulling the mesh around until I got the proportions in a good place. I then used the Dam Standard and started to draw out the anatomy using references from skinned animals.

Then I utilized clay tubes to flesh out those forms. Once the anatomy was done, I sculpted all of the scales by hand using some organic alphas on top. The dragon design changed a lot over time, from something skeletal and flesh-like to something more armor-plated/crocodile scale-like. This alteration was done to give the dragon a more menacing look and to keep it in line with the armored-like main character.

The hair was first roughly blocked out in ZBrush, just using very thin cylinders bent into place, and then later developed in Fibershop. Although it was my first time using Fibershop, I was able to pick it up quite easily to create the hair strand textures.

The hair design itself was inspired by Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, very thin, sparse, and stringy. To produce this effect, I created a few sections using different clump and curl modifiers to give it that look. I then went into Maya, took a square plane with zero subdivisions, and applied the textures from Fibershop with the alpha.

Then I cut out each hair strand section using the insert edge tool, deleting the empty faces in between, separating them, then adding enough subdivisions so they wouldn't become faceted when bent into place. Finally, I clumped/layered certain sections together, giving it a little more dimension, and placed everything by hand, only using the transform tool and soft select.

All of my topology was done in Maya using the Quad Draw tool. Once my high-poly was done, I decimated everything down in ZBrush, brought it into Maya, and retopo everything by hand. Sometimes, the topology for certain pieces that did not need to be deformed was good enough, taken from the lowest subdivision from when it was originally ZRemeshed.

I keep all pieces queued evenly for cleaner deformation, and the polycount was higher for portfolio purposes, but could be reduced in some areas if it were to actually go into a game.

The UVs were also done in Maya. I made cuts along areas that were most hidden to try and avoid any sort of seam issues. Nevertheless, with cloth, it is cut where the seams are stitched together so that patterns can lie naturally, the way they would in real life.

The way they were laid out was so that the texel density could be relatively even across every piece. You can see in the image that the texture sets are coordinated by color:

Texturing and Lighting

So when I first started texturing, I wanted to make sure I Polypaint everything in ZBrush so that when I brought it into Substance 3D Painter, I could easily create masks by baking the Polypaint to the ID Mask and make use of Color Selection to make all of my masks. Most of everything that I texture follows variations of the same formula:

1. Create folders for each piece and create masks using the Color Selection.
2. Start with a fill layer with a base color and base roughness.
3. Grab a material that is closest to the actual material you are going for (ex, my main piece of armor, I used the Iron material).
4. Set the correct projection setting and set the tiling proportionate to the object.
5. From here, it is just layering and layering subtly on top. Use a lot of grunge layers (for grime/dirt/wear) of different scales, roughnesses, colors, heights, etc. Tweak the values of each of the layers from the balance, to the blending layer, etc. If you don't like all parts of the layer, you can add a paint layer to mask out certain areas. Don't add for adding sake, use your references and layer intentionally and subtly to create a cohesive texture.  Don't go overboard or your textures will end up noisy and crunchy.
6. Once it's in a good place, you create a new paint layer at the top of the stack, set the blender layer to pass through, and you can add filters like HSL Perceptive, Contrast Luminosity, Color Balance, etc., to tweak the final look.

For this project, I used Marmoset Toolbag to render the scene. The idea for it was to have something fantasy-like. I was aiming for something out of Dark Souls/Elden Ring for the environment, something like a forest/swamp or old gothic scene. I didn't want to create the whole environment myself.

I went into FAB in the Unreal Engine marketplace and looked at all of the Quixel assets. I found more forest/mossy assets than gothic ones, so that is the direction I went. So I downloaded moss-covered walls, stairs, rocks, and dead/alive trees. In Marmoset Toolbag, I started laying out all the assets to build an environment.

I added my posed character in the scene and framed him up so the focus would be on him. I posed all the assets from the trees, rocks, walls, etc., to drive the eyes back to the center of the frame onto the character. It still felt a bit bare and monochromatic, so I created a bunch of cards with leaves and scattered them around the scene to bring a pop of color to tie in and a sense of movement. Lastly, I added a fog element to ground the whole thing and give it a sense of atmosphere.

The lighting is a pretty straightforward 3-point lighting setup with a few extras. Spot lights were used as a main source: a key, a fill, and multiple rim lights to pop the character from the background. Also, an omnidirectional light near the face of the character and dragon to draw vision to them.

To create a bit more atmosphere, I placed a couple of branches in front of the key light to cast shadows onto the character to make it really feel like it was in the forest and the moon was shining through the branches.  The character was still getting a bit lost in the shadows, so a soft blue light was shone top down in the back of him to separate him from the background, adding a bit more layering. Lastly, I tweak the lens (70mm) and post effects such as adding depth of field, a bit of sharpening, vignette, and film grain.

Conclusion

The project took about a year off and on, with the little free time I have. There were a lot of design changes along the way that make things take longer than if you were to copy the concept one for one, but I always like to put my twist on things and add a bit of my own taste to the project, so in the end it's worth the extra time to make sure it's quality instead of rushing it out the door.

The part I enjoyed the most was finishing it. Seeing it all come together in the end, once you're in Marmoset Toolbag, is such a great feeling. But honestly, I really enjoy every part of the process (minus the retopo), and if I didn't, I probably wouldn't be doing this as my passion and my job and putting so many hours into these projects. Every part is both fun and challenging, and I learn something new and level up with every piece, which is very gratifying.

For anyone looking for tutorials, I would always recommend YouTube. You can find almost everything you want on there. Watch people stream on Twitch to see artists do it in real time instead of all of the time-lapses you see. GumRoad has a lot of great artists with amazing paid tutorials.

But the times I have leveled up the most are when I have found a mentorship or a class where I can get more one-on-one time and work with more realistic deadlines. Lastly, I want to thank Raf Grassetti, Breno Salles, and Mike Haney for all of the invaluable feedback they gave me along the way on this project.

Cole Henry-Mashuga, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford