LogInGithmi Jayasinghe shared the process behind the Fuchsia Fairy, showing how she was sculpted and assembled piece by piece, and discussing the hand-painting process.
Introduction
Hello everyone! My name is Githmi Jayasinghe, and I'm a 3D Character Artist born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, with Sri Lankan descent. From a young age, I've always been interested in the world of art and animation. I have vivid memories of myself, as young as eight years old, animating little clips on my Nintendo DSi, making short films with a small camera, and even creating a few stop-motion videos with my dolls. I also spent time watching and sometimes even helping my mom, who is a Cake Designer and has her own business, as she sculpted custom figurines with fondant.
As someone who grew up with a colourful childhood filled with beautiful animated films from various studios, I quickly became interested in the idea of working in the film industry. As early as eighth grade, I decided I wanted to become a 3D Modeler! My high school had an animation course, so I had time to self learn Maya every day. This was also when I began to grow serious about drawing, painting, and observational studies.
Straight after high school, I attended Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. During those four years, I learned the full 3D pipeline and received my Bachelor's degree in Media Arts with a major in 3D Animation. Now I'm currently in my second term at Think Tank Training Centre's online program, where I'm having fun specialising in characters for film!
Fuchsia Fairy
My Fuchsia Fairy was created for Think Tank Training Centre's final project of the Foundation term. I used Maya, Mari, ZBrush, Procreate, and Nuke. I had been searching for concepts for ages when I finally came across some vintage children's fairy tales online. The project guidelines required us to match our concept 1:1, so there were several factors to consider to avoid setting myself up for failure.
Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairy series was lovely and delicate, and caught my eye immediately, especially since I loved Tinkerbell as a child, and still do! There were just so many fairies to choose from, but I ultimately narrowed it down to the Fuchsia Fairy and the two Apple Blossom fairies.
Initially, I felt that she was too plain and simple, but the project had many hidden intricacies that made it the perfect scale for me to complete comfortably while still challenging myself. Every day I worked on the project, I couldn't help but realise how perfect it was for me!
Getting Started
When it came to the planning process, a vital part of it came down to giving myself a lot of flex days that I could remove at a later point, overestimating how much time I would take, in a sense. Above is the final schedule detailing what I did each day, but in the beginning, it had days for retopology, rigging, and general "refining" planned. This gave me freedom and a stress-free experience at all times since I knew I had days to fall back on if I didn't reach the day's goal.
The way I decided to work and keep myself on schedule every day was by staying strict and true to my plan. This meant that even if I wanted to tweak things more the following day, I started on what was planned instead. It's quite easy to fall behind, so I recommend this approach. Oftentimes, I was even ahead of schedule due to this practice! That allowed me to go back and tweak the previous day's work early on.
In 3D, it's important to develop every aspect cohesively so there are no surprises down the line. In fact, my first render test with a basic lighting setup and rough blockout was done as early as day 5. Naturally, as artists, we want to perfect everything right away, but if you avoid having tunnel vision on a single aspect from the get-go, you can have easier portions completed ahead of time before you get back to refining. Especially for a project where you have limited time (in my case, around one month), staying calm and being diligent with your plan is key.
Another practice I started during my time at Emily Carr was creating a Google Slides presentation as a means of keeping myself organised for big projects. Every day, I would include some screenshots of what I worked on and include notes, and blockers to present during my weekly class.
I noticed a lot of my peers looked forward to seeing my slides every week! Not only was it nice to keep track of everything for the ease of presenting, but having this information is important for me to be able to look back on. I now know how long it takes me to do certain things, so I can use this to plan for my projects in the future.
A big part of my process was making sure each pixel matched 1:1 with the concept. Early on in the modeling stage, I had my reference imported as an image plane so I could make sure everything matched up. Posing the hands and feet was less of a challenge, but making sure the Fairy's face maintained the same soft and youthful feeling was a big feat.
I had a lot of back and forth with ZBrush and Maya to ensure things matched up well. However, the Maya sculpting tools were a big part of tweaking the mesh in the later refining stages. This whole journey of modelling involved countless iterations and assessments over the four weeks to make sure every pixel looked perfect!
Using XGen for the hair was initially worrisome, as it would only be my second XGen groom. However, after taking the time to place the guides and use separate descriptions for certain parts, such as the bangs, I managed to create something I was happy with. What really brought her hair to life was using V-Ray's hair shader and adding more hair guides to direct each strand.
Texturing
The texturing process was another of my favourite portions of this project. Because of my experience doing a lot of traditional and digital painting, doing a hand-painted approach came naturally to me. I started by making a simple base using my Ambient Occlusion and Curvature Maps layered on top, and went straight to painting.
I worked primarily on the base colour in Mari, using multiple colour nodes for a non-destructive workflow. Everything was organised inside several custom Smart Material bases (red outer flower, purple inner petals, etc), which I had created to keep my node stream clean. While I tried downloading watercolor brushes, I found the default Mari brushes were the most effective.
I used the organic brushes, like the freckles and vascular veinage brushes, quite often for the desired look. Sometimes I also layered the cloud nodes as a mask for further breakup.
It's important to observe the reference in detail and pick up even the faintest hints of colors to make your paint layers pop and have depth. My biggest tip when painting textures, or painting in general, is to destaturate your reference so you can study the values. This practice helps quite a bit when you're trying to match things!
For the wings, since they involved so many colours, I decided to paint the UVs in Procreate instead. This allowed me to paint freely without having to create several colors and merge nodes in Mari. Using my favourite watercolor brushes got me a result quite quickly! After I imported that image back to Mari, some simple projection and warping were all I needed.
For all the other maps, I simply used my base color and ran it through a luminosity node to desaturate them and used the levels nodes accordingly for Roughness, Specular, and Bump. Sometimes I layered a tiled pattern like flower veins on top for slightly more depth, but it was mostly hand-painted. The shaders for all the plants were the V-Ray Standard Material with SSS on it to make it feel tangible, and the skin itself used the V-Ray alSurface.
For the lighting, all I used was an HDRI to set the general mood of the scene, and brightened up some areas with square lights while keeping the idea of the basic 3-point light setup in mind.
Conclusion
Compositing in Nuke is often one of my favourite parts because it adds the finishing touch and enhances your hard work! However, for this project, I dialled a lot of it inside Maya itself, so I only needed very minimal tweaks. I mainly used cryptomatte to mask out certain plants and leaves for color grading, and overlaid some watercolour and paper textures onto the background.
I also graded some of my lights using the LightMix Render Element. Additionally, since I was unable to achieve the painterly shadow effect with lighting, as it wouldn't occur naturally, I hand-painted it in Procreate and merged it onto the final image.
For the final touch, I always like to add a hint of Chromatic Aberration and Exponential Glow to tie everything together. Overall, I'm really proud of this project! I grew confident in myself while working on it. The Fuchsia Fairy now holds a special place in my heart, and I'm so happy to have been able to share my experience with you all.
My advice to beginners: for those wanting to complete a project in a short timeframe, I recommend doing a decent amount of planning and being realistic with your scale. You can always push a simple project to a higher quality, but if you pick something very complicated and can't deliver, it reflects negatively on you and will impact your own confidence.
Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, staying true to your schedule is crucial. If you get caught up in one thing, it can be easy to fall behind and play the catch-up game. Make a list of things you need to tackle later and pick your battles! Just keep pushing ahead, and things will get done that way.
One last piece of advice is to branch out and try to make friends in the 3D community! Being surrounded by like-minded people and just having fun will always be uplifting and push you to work harder. Naturally, as artists, some of us can be quite introverted, but it'll be worth it in the end and make your journey just a little sweeter.
I would like to give my thanks to my supervisor, Benjamin Hoellrigl, for his constant support and encouragement, and to all my lovely friends at Think Tank Training Centre who showered me with love and laughter. Lastly, thank you to my dear mom, who stood by my side with constant support and helped advise me on sculpting my fairy.
I couldn't have done it without you! I really appreciate my family and all my peers who have helped me on this path. I wish everyone the best of luck in their 3D journey. You can do it!