Transferring 2D Character into 3D with ZBrush & Marmoset Toolbag

Introduction

Hello! I am Clémence de Casanove. I'm from France, 30 years old. I have a biology degree, and I decided to change my path and embrace my art passion. Sculpting, drawing, observing, creating characters, creatures, and universes has always been here, and I have a fascination for anatomy and form ,and function. 

I’ve also always been fascinated by how films or games were made, so the industry path was a logical answer to all my interests. I liked the ability to bring characters and universes to life and allow players to interact with them. That’s why I like 3D, and I am in it right now.

For now, most of my projects have been individual, as I am still a student, but recently I finished my first group project. My team and I were asked to create a demo game from the ground up, and I was in charge of creating the main character. It was hard, but we are very happy with what we managed to produce over 5 months. If you are interested, here is the group project for Espelir. I learned a lot during this period!

Getting Started

This project is a school project. The main goal for us was to improve and let go, sculpting-wise. It was very refreshing because no real "tech" was used; we had to rely only on our artistic sense, which was a blast. 

Our teacher, Adrien Simon, gave us a choice between many stylized characters, and this one immediately caught my eye. I was already a big fan of Lin Chang, the concept artist behind Master Oliver, and I was very happy to find that character on the list. The character is pointy and nervous; a bard with a sassy look, with horns and a tail. How to not fall in love? 

I admit that I was rather intimidated by all the details and little objects all over, and the fact that I will have to do a lot of organic hard surfaces. But I knew it would also teach me a lot! For this project, I wanted to test my sculpting speed, my ability to sculpt cleanly, and mostly, having fun sculpting and painting him.

Modeling

Everything was done in ZBrush. I began with a very ugly Photoshop sketch of a front view to have the global proportions (adjusting a drawing is much faster than a sculpt for me in these initial stages). 

I then sculpted him in T-pose to adjust proportions, and, as the goal was to do a one-on-one with the concept, I quickly put him in the pose using the good old transparency of ZBrush. I posed him from the front view, as I knew that it would always be the same each time I go back to it. I also set up the ZBrush camera to have a "neutral" focal (around 85) and so minimize the deformations.

After the first day of work

Head and eyes are, for me, the most important in a character, and having "the right look" quickly helps to have the feeling of the character. So I put a bit more effort into the head first:

After the second day, I painted the eyes very quickly to get the feeling of the character!

The tricky part was that both ZBrush and Marmoset (where I rendered the figure) needed to be set up to match the concept perfectly. Thus, I also put him rapidly in Marmoset to check if the match was still good. Through the sculpting process, I did a lot of back and forth between ZBrush and Marmoset. Also, the model needed to be coherent on 360° while respecting the concept. It was very challenging but interesting!

One of the things that helps me a lot while sculpting is switching between materials. Skin shade or chalk is perfect to mimic what a model will look like in a render software, as it smooths down every detail. So if your sculpt seems too smooth with these shaders, the odds are high that your sculpt will appear flat on a "real" camera. 

For this sculpt, I also wanted to improve the cleanliness of my render, so I asked myself: what kind of material is absolutely not forgiving in hiding mistakes? Thinking about cars, I switch to a metal material and, well, it hides nothing! So switching regularly between materials was one of the big helpers to achieve a crisp look!

Before and after the refinement, you can see how much the details are accentuated with the metal shader, compared to the basic one!

Most of him is sculpted from deformed spheres. I tend to separate my model into a lot of subtools and/or groups to have more control.

For the clothes, I went with a plane with very few vertices. For the hard-surface parts, like the shoulder or the luth, I began with a sphere/cube/cylinder, ZRemeshed it to have a more functional topology, sculpted it to the desired form, and then do another ZRemesh to have a topology that matches the new form. I can also use a bit of ZModeler to adjust.

The hair was one sphere I deformed into an almond shape, ZRemeshed it to have a simpler and cleaner topology. I then duplicated this base form and used the magical bend curve option to deform it. You can find it when clicking on the gear in gismo mode. There are a lot of options, but the bend curve is one that I use a lot, super handy for organic shapes.

For all the little forms like the bones, I sculpted one form that was close to the average, duplicated it, and reshaped it to the length and shape I wanted for each one. 

For more complex forms like the pentagram, duplication and small adjustments were also the way to go.

On Friday of the first week

At the end of the second week 

Finally, to achieve many forms that needed to follow the sculpt (like the wrap around the Luth or the metal part on the jacket), I used the extract option. You need to have a clean surface with the proportion and the shape you want underneath the actual piece, and a lot of density, then you can go!

Other than that, it was just a lot of patience and understanding the form to keep the sculpt coherent.

Retopology & Unwrapping

I must admit that this project is not industry-ready! No real topology was used here (I mean, I did some ZRemesh to have a "clean" topology to sculpt on, but nothing more fancy) as the main goal was purely artistic. In the final render, it is a simple decimation out of ZBrush and exported as an OBJ. The paint was done by hand directly on the model in ZBrush.

Texturing

I painted him directly in ZBrush with the basic brush. The vast majority of him was painted "with my eyes," but to be sure of the placement of some elements, I checked with the transparency of ZBrush. For the signs all over him, I quickly sketched them and then traced them, still using the transparency to save time. I could have done some stamps using alphas that I would have to create in Photoshop. But as it was a concept copy and with all of them being quite different, I preferred this method. For a game-ready character, I would surely have used alphas.

For the colors, I used a mix of my eyes and the ZColor tool that allows you to eyedrop anywhere on the screen. 

I then applied my colors in big patches and painted using the transparency of the brush for the transition, plus the color wheel.

For some part of him, the color scattering option of the brush was used to add variation and pattern, like on the puffy sleeves. I created patterns in Photoshop and did a quick unwrap on the parts that needed these textures, thanks to the ZBrush UV tools.

Most of the paint was done in a "destructive way" except for these parts where I used the layer system of ZBrush, like the layer system in Photoshop, to paint the shadows.

One of the maps

While analyzing how the artist painted him, I thought that the dirt pattern on the boots was also done using layers, so I did the same with the ZBrush layer system.

For the outline, I duplicated the meshes in big groups, flipped them, scaled them up a bit, adjusted and colored them to mimic the different colors of the concept. Unfortunately, it is great for the outline of the global character, but the lines inside the character are very tricky, particularly if you want your character to turn. Some lines were also directly painted on the model.

Lighting & Rendering

For the colored render, I used no light as it is purely unlit shaders. Only the clay render is lit! 

In Photoshop, I created a gradient to mimic the one on the concept that I applied on a plane with basic UVs; same for the shadows. Also, I added an alpha to them. 

In ZBrush, I simply decimated my subtools (with the option to keep polypaint activated) and exported them in OBJ. In Marmoset, for both the outline and the sculpt, I activated the "vertex color" option in the albedo section of the material.  

For all these meshes, I then choose the unlit option in the diffusion section. That allows you to make an unlit render! Finally, for the clay, I used a three-point light source and a bit of subsurface scattering. In the end, I only slightly adjusted the levels in Photoshop and used the ACES mode for the clay render; the colored one was good as it was.

Conclusion

To finish everything, it took a bit more than three weeks of work; the sculpting part was the longest.

The main challenges were to find a new way of sculpting and experimenting while having a short deadline (we had three weeks to finish and render it, and I did the clay renders after the exercises). Once I found my workflow, it was long and tedious, but not "that" hard.

With this project, I learned to absolutely not to be afraid to experiment, and I gained a lot of confidence in my sculpting and artistic skills. But my biggest enemy was my perfectionism, while it allows me to have good results, it is also holding me back a lot. I learned to let go and accept that it is good enough and that I need to move on to the next step! (Thanks to my friends who helped me with that!)

In the end, my advice for a beginning artist would be, yes, you have to do a lot of studies to work your eye, and in the 3D field, learn a lot of workflows that are not always very fun. But it is crucial to maintain the flame by doing things to improve, but mostly by having fun!

Allowing ourselves to have fun from time to time is important. Also, taking a break is great, do not completely overfocus, or you will do the wrong things all over again and again. A fresh eye is always the best! 

Et voilà! I hope you will appreciate this Master Oliver adaptation!

Clémence De Casanove, 3D Character/Creature Artist