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[3D modeling learning]Stylized characters in ZBrush, the process of making a baseball girl and designing Yuzu

I also refer to the character concept art of Disney’s recent movies. I like how their facial expressions are portrayed, and how simple and influential their characters are.

In order to better understand the body shape of the character, I like to do a quick paint on the concept. This tracing sketch made me notice what I might have overlooked at first glance.

The workflow is exactly the same as described on Hannah’s CGMA webpage. I try to keep my process clean and simple. After finishing the high-resolution sculpting in ZBrush, I brought it into Blender]for retopology and UV unwrapping. Then, I textured it in Substance Painter and rendered it in Blender Cycles. I often move back and forth between different software because there are always changes.

In the course, we make sure to have a solid anatomical foundation before starting to sculpt. Use moving, smoothing and pinching brushes to build the body using simple shapes at the beginning. After dynameshing and zremeshing, clay accumulation and smooth brushes came in handy. Hard surface objects, such as shoes, hats, baseball bats, and small accessories, still have to be box modeled in Blender, because sculpting them will not give me a clean result.

When shooting pomelo, I pay attention to the silhouette, focusing on the parts of the body that will turn. I used the transpose tool in ZBrush, which is really convenient when posing quickly. However, using this tool will sacrifice the opportunity for character animation to make it a digital figurine.

Due to the limited number of pomelo illustrations, it is difficult to imagine the entire posing jacket as a 3D shape in my mind, so I took a photo of myself wearing a thick jacket and holding a baseball bat as an additional reference. Hannah also suggested that I check the wrinkles of the clothing, because the thickness of the jacket depends on their size.

The jacket is the only object I didn’t re-layout manually, simply because Zremesher did a better job. As shown below, I masked each part into a polygonal group so that ZBrush can Zremesh the entire jacket cleanly. In order to give the impression of fabric to the jacket, I polished it with the alpha brush of the fabric wrinkle brush library.

I plan to give Yuzu particle hair, but for this particular character, poly hair works better and uses less time and energy to render the final image. The hair and tail are given a new material, so each hair starts with a different gradient.

I use Substance Painter to create different UV maps. This character is not going to be submitted to the game, so I gave her a 4K texture map. The additional subsurface scattering map is hand-painted, which allows me to control the translucency of the skin in different areas of the body. I also try to keep texture details to a minimum, so as not to divert attention from the stylized look and feel. Photoshop is used to enhance the UV map to make it more vivid.

When lighting the character, I like to use the basic three-point lighting setup. The HDRI of the indoor environment is added to make the material more reflective. There is a small point light source in front of each eye, so that the eye will have a white point reflection. This is important because reflections make your character look lifelike. According to my observations in photography, I also added a large soft light pointing to her face as a reflected light at the bottom.

The end result is color grading in Photoshop. A small illustration was added to draw more attention to the character.

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