Week 57 - Unicorn Cleric Sculpt & What It Means to Create

 Alright... It's time we ran it back.

Its been a minute since I've been here. At the end of April my mother passed away very suddenly during spring finals, I've spent the time since adjusting and learning to stand on my own feet. Learning what it means to love and to create something you're passionate about.

I feel this context is important, I don't know who reads this, but you don't need to be perfect all of the time. You can hate your work, your art, and even yourself but you owe it to your past and future self to keep fighting.

One of the people who helped me significantly is my friend Caden, I've mentioned him several times for critique or discussion. During one of our many, many, late night talks he said to me:

"Fighting for a reason is different than fighting over nothing. Fighting can mean you care"

Caden and I met as coworkers during tutoring, but Caden is also my Game Master for my 2025 D&D Curse of Strahd campaign. He has come to know me through my character, Arwyn, a Aasimar Cleric of the Dream Court, a magical place that controls the ebbs and flow of dreams throughout the different planes of existence. When I first wrote him, he was nothing more than a good man, a musician, who was being sent by his goddess into a world he did not know.

Arwyn is not a good man anymore.

Throughout the story progression, Arwyn has had to come to reality that he is a flawed, sometimes cowardly or selfish, man. Arwyn has made me realize things about myself. He has helped me through this dark period in my life. You don't count the days rotting, or the time the sun has come and gone, even the meals stopped being counted. You counted the days until Kc could rest and Arwyn could take over, if only for a few hours.

In my two month break from any significant game dev work, and at the encouragement of faculty, I focused on illustration, anything to keep me creative and working. In two months I created 53 pieces of unique art, Arwyn was always amongst the most popular subject. During this time I focused heavily on rebuilding my fundamentals of art and targeting where I struggled. I did a lot of anatomy studies and different rendering practices to improve. Different methods. Different ideas. Consistently.

Now, being back at FIEA, I turn back to Arwyn, being reminded of all that Purah was to me and how I can once again, be better. Now, lets get into it;

To understand why I did this project, we first need to identify some problems with the Purah model I made;

1. Her legs are straight down rather than bending back in a digitigrade fashion
2. I wasn't set on clothing designs which caused me to go through many iterations and have to create everything in Zbrush
3. General green-ness to Zbrush caused many mesh errors, such as her head/body being seperate and frequent dynamesh errors on her antlers.
4. Posing her was, to put frankly, a gigantic pain in the ass because of reason 3 and near impossible.

I will admit, the speed Arwyn's sculpt was assisted with re-using several older projects that were abandoned or sketches, such as the digitigrade legs from week 40, that are actually made for a sketch of Kindred from League of Legends. These focused largely on the muscle groups so I could add fat/hair where necessary depending on the model being made.

Here is Purah's model with them adapted to her torso. You can see how the muscles are blended out but still retain enough information to be readable. This is the base version of Arwyn that would be modified.

Additionally, I went back to week 35 and nabbed his head that I sculpted as a demo for one of my students. Still one of my favorites.

Combining the two projects was a bit harder than anticipated as I wanted Arwyn to be physically much larger than Purah both in height and width while remaining proportional to his legs, he is 6'5-7ft (before horn) in our game and Purah is 6'2 (before antlers)

Overall he has wider shoulders and larger arms, a different style of hoof (deer vs horse), and is significantly taller. Please note I'm using the final version of his body for this comparisons because I took the pictures after.

Awesome! That theoretically solves #1 and #3, #4 we should be okay for, but that's not something I'll know yet, so what about #2?

Let me introduce you to: Marvelous Designer, aka my new best friend until the end of time. "Why wasn't I using this for Purah?" you might ask... I'll let my best friend Colby explain for me:

Thank you Colby.... I'll remember this.

Anyway, after pressing many buttons and creating terrible abominations to fashion kind, I was able to create a pattern for his typical adventuring gear - yes this is what he wears while facing the Horrors™, fae unicorn man, after all -- by using a proxy model of his body. I didn't worry about the hair in this as I presumed the longer strands would get in the way rather than helping.

The irony in this is that I actually do have three professionally created and illustrated outfits for Arwyn that I like to put him in, however spite is a powerful motivator and all of my friends demand to have a reference for this one specifically. Please note I'm using the final version of his outfit for this because I took the pictures after.

By the end of day 1, this was my current progress and we were several weeks ahead of progress compared to Purah with harvesting previous projects and Marvelous Designer.

From here, my progress becomes a bit harder to track as I slept and did a second pass on his body and clothes. A lot of this time was spent simplifying shapes, adding accessories and gear, and tweaking small parts of the design I wanted to see changes on. At the current point, everything still needs at least one or two touch ups, but I wanted to get significant critique before jumping into the finer details of things.

References:

As a side quest, I also wanted to learn more about how far I could push Marvelous Designer and have since been using Purah's model to make dresses for some of the other characters I would eventually like to make. For a redo of Purah's model, I designed a dark fairy-court style dress for one of my discord communities under the prompt 'Umbra'

I learned a lot through this mini-project, mainly how puckering and internal lines can be used in MD. I'm hoping to get this all rendered out by next week for a proper showcase :)

Week 45 - Kotallo Headdress, Horizon Forbidden West Fan Art - Retopo & UVS

   Milestone 03 Check In: Retopology & UVs

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards with sub-surface scattering & ray tracing

Unreal Engine, Hair cards in normal base colour

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards without alphas & an ID map

Substance Painter, Hardsurface metal pieces, 2048x texture

Wireframe, 82k tris with hair - 46k without

Schedule

[06/16] BLOCKOUT [✔] -- First pass ofeverything; establish the form and sizing for all objects

[06/23] REFINEMENT & HAIR CARDS [✔] -- Refining the hardsurface and rope designs into a high poly; create a first pass of the larger plume/hair cards

[06/30] RETOPO & UVS [✔] -- Retopology, uvs and a secondary hair pass

[07/07] TEXTURING & RENDERING []  -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Tools used: Maya (Ahoge & GS Curves plugin), Substance Painter, Fiber Shop, Unreal Engine

 References

For this project, since I escaped the soft fleshy bits of character sculpting, a lot of my references are just trying to understand the shape language that Horizon Forbidden West uses for their warriors, in this case the Tenakth Marshalls.

Horizon Forbidden West – Outfit for Kotallo by Brian Loh, pre-Embassy Questline

Extra Renders

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards in normal base colour

Marmoset Toolbag, Hair cards with sub-surface scattering without ray tracing

 Critique

Massive thank you to Richard Bacallao from Cohort 21 for the feedback! His main notes go as follows (6/28):

1.  The biggest thing I see right now is a lack of density for the hair itself.
• You have very visible clumps of hair that end up making the cards themselves look flat, especially near the tips. Add some more cards to those bends at the tips to help fill them out so they don’t look super flat
• I see from your renders that you have large and medium-sized clumps; I’d go in and add another layer of both big and medium-sized clumps to add in some more overall density and coverage. You already have a good amount but just a bit more to push it further and just keep an eye on any clipping or intersecting
• The overall strands of hair in your big clumps also need some more density to help with coverage. I’d also make them look slightly more generic to help avoid seeing repeated patterns in the hair style.
• 
  
2. One thing you can do for your new layers of hair cards is to start cross-sectioning them to give the illusion of some layering happening, all of your cards follow the same flow so crossing some cards over each other where a few are going in an opposite flow can add some believability to the piece
• I’d also start thinking about a flyaway hair layer, adding in that sort of visual noise where it’s quite subtle and can bring the entire thing to life.
  
  
3. My other big critique is overall resolution of the hair cards and the clumping of the hair cards. Don’t be afraid to go all out on this resolution
4. For more of a sort of tuft fur look I would look into making the overall shape of the cards to be wider at the base

Nick feedback:

• Although im not using a high poly for this project, since the main learning focus is centered around the hair, I should throw the hardsurface parts into zbrush, hit them with a dynamesh and polish so the edges can be slightly bevelled.

thanks for coming to my TED Talk <3

NOTE: Posted early for critique purposes

Week 40 - Ireena Kolyana, Curse of Strahd, Sculpt - Sculpting

Milestone 02 Check In: Blockout

 References

Since I'm following a single illustrative interpretation of this character, a lot of the focus was put into shape definition and anatomical structuring, particularly on the glabella (skin between eyebrows) and quadratus labii inferioris (muscles on the corners of the mouth)

Key Art: Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, 

permission to create her was obtained before the project began :)

Shortfalls:

For this week, the main goal was to get all of the sculpting finalized to continue onto the retopologizing in the later weeks. However, I didn't get all the sculpting done, specifically on the gauntlets. The gauntlets use the same design as the gorget, previously described as the 'breastplate' or 'chestpiece' in previous weeks, which ended up being an extremely tedious process of breaking Maya.

The process I used for making the gorget involved modeling the key shapes onto a plane, focusing on the base glass, shapes then expanding outwards to create the frame. Originally, this was going to be achieved with alphas; however, due to the complexity of the gothic design and this talk at the 2023 Zbrush summit from Blizzard's Overwatch team, I decided to continue the design in Maya

The gauntlets bring their own challenges in the form of their complexity compared to the gorget; the shapes have very little breathing room against the other stained glass pieces, requiring them to be a tight fit.

This method led to its own downfalls, mainly there being an issue with the inner corner of the shape frames, the yellow polygroup, not going far enough in the geometry, causing the glass shape underneath to be fully seen

Closeup of the gorget

Same image above with polygroups

Another main issue I had was in regard to matching the reference image, because of the nature of posing and stylization of the drawing. Hegval notes the style is reminiscent of Hades, a lot of the anatomy works but is seen at a much wider focal length, bringing many of the details much closer together than I'm able to achieve inside of ZBrush. This could be a case of 'illustrator anatomy' versus realistic anatomy; however, I attempted to follow the reference as close as possible to the sections I could.

A common question I got when making this sculpt was regarding the use of orthographic versus perspective view mode. I feel somehow the issue above is related to the nature at which Ireena is posed; however, I don't know of a specific fix for this.

Orthographic view of Ireena versus Perspective

Resources:

I mentioned these resources last week, however I rewatched them over the course of working on this project and I really think they significantly improved the workflow and direction of this project. Being able to peel back the overall design concepts, both in a professional and casual setting, such as TBSkyen for League, and understand how and why characters are designed a certain way adds a whole new level to the creation process.

It is mentioned in one of the videos above, but Renaud Galand's gumroad has a fantastic free hair brush and matcap/material library that has fit in perfectly with my workflows!

Additional resources:

• Ruffle Insert Multi-Mesh Brushes for Zbrush by Alexandra Jackson
• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Mark Lambert's Hair tutorial
• Chloe Worthy's Beginner Headblock in Zbrush
• Sean Forsyth's Cloth Folds

Schedule

[05/19] BLOCKOUT [✔] -- Overall blockout complete; some secondary forms emerge, but the overall flow of the piece is present. Polypaint used to differentiate material types

[05/26] SCULPTING [✔] -- Detail sculpting completed. All objects have secondary and tertiary details present.

[06/02] RETOPO & UVS -- Retopologizing the model down to a goal of 30k tris, following reference from Overwatch 1's character models (Source).

[06/09] TEXTURING & RENDERING -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows rather than handpainting due to time constraints. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

*During the retopology phase I'll be looking into different methods to work through the gauntlets and potentially redoing the gorget. In the meantime, they will proceed as normal until an alternative can be found.

Blockout & Unreal Blockout

Week 39 - Ireena Kolyana, Curse of Strahd, Sculpt - Blockout

Milestone 01 Check In: Blockout

 References

Since I'm following a single illustrative interpretation of this character, a lot of the focus was put into shape definition and anatomical structuring, particularly on the glabella (skin between eyebrows) and quadratus labii inferioris (muscles on the corners of the mouth)

Key Art: Illustration by Hegval on Reddit, 

permission to create her was obtained before the project began :)

Resources:

At the point I stopped working on this project on week 34, I started doing a lot more short-term studies, particularly of different D&D characters' faces and hairstyles. Since working on the first version of it, I've done a lot of studies into making good hair within Zbrush and the different methods utilized (see Week 35's Sketchbook Tour for some of them)

That being said, both Chloe Worthy and Mark Lambert have been two entirely different ends of resourceful help with these studies. Both have very comprehensive guides for how they do hair studies, with Lambert's being stylistically simpler and easier to digest, while Worthy is able to build on that understanding.

I found Worthy's tutorial "ZBrush Beginner Tutorial - (Very Beginner) Perhaps the Beginner of all time"  extremely helpful for getting a secondary look into how a master artist approaches head sculpting

Additional resources.

• Ruffle Insert Multi-Mesh Brushes for Zbrush by Alexandra Jackson
• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Mark Lambert's Hair tutorial

Schedule

[05/19] BLOCKOUT -- Overall blockout complete; some secondary forms emerge, but the overall flow of the piece is present. Polypaint used to differentiate material types

[05/26] SCULPTING -- Detail sculpting completed. All objects have secondary and tertiary details present.

[06/02] RETOPO & UVS -- Retopologizing the model down to a goal of 30k tris, following reference from Overwatch 1's character models (Source).

[06/09] TEXTURING & RENDERING -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows rather than handpainting due to time constraints. Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Resources for the texturing section:

• Overwatch Character Creation Pipeline - Blizzard Entertainment Overwatch Team - 2023 ZBrush Summit
• How Overwatch 2 Heroes Are Created

Blockout & Unreal Blockout