Seeds of Destruction - thesis character renders finally up!

This will be a short post, but a good one! I finally present to you the Four, of my thesis project Seeds of Destruction:

Additional rendered angles of the characters as well as the original concept illustrations can be seen over on my portfolio website!

Phew. This post has been a long time coming. My original concepts for these guys were very much in a 2D illustrated style, which I wanted to carry through into the 3D models. I ended up experimenting with many techniques to accomplish this. One particular strategy I ended up using to get a more hand painted look in the textures was to, well, hand paint the textures. I actually printed out the UV shells for each character once I had sculpted them in ZBrush and baked some ambient occlusion (so I would have some shading for reference when I started to paint). I printed on a decent card stock, which was the only thing I tried that would both go thru my printer without jamming it, and would also hold up semi-well to watercolors and ink.

Inked lines pass for Famine

Watercolor texture pass for Famine

I did two passes for each character - one to get the brush painted texture and occlusion with watercolors, and another with an ink pen to do some linework to emphasize some features, especially on the faces. I also later combined this hand done linework with Maya's toon line functionality to achieve the final lined quality seen in the rendered images. I found that using the handpainted textures with ramp shaders in Maya best achieved the result I was looking for in 3D, and overall I am quite happy with the result!

Tools used were Maya for modelling and rendering, ZBrush for sculpting, and Photoshop for texturing and editing. Thanks for reading!