logo80lv
Articlesclick_arrow
Research
Talentsclick_arrow
Events
Workshops
Aboutclick_arrow
profile_loginLogIn

Eureka: Sculpting Stylized Cloth & PBR Texturing

Manuel Sitompul talked about the production of his new PBR character based on Flaviano Pivoto's concept.

In case you missed it

Read Manuel Sitompul's previous article

Motivation

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a variety of projects with different kinds of styles. My last portfolio project was fully hand-painted, so I decided to try a different direction and create a PBR character.

Eureka!

In order to diversify my portfolio, I tried to find a fun concept to work from. Eventually, I found an awesome concept made by Flaviano Pivoto which was perfect for the type of project I wanted to create.

Sculpting Stylized Cloth

Translating this concept to 3D came with a few challenges. One of the biggest challenges was creating stylized folds and creases in the clothing. I had to decide on a 3D art style for these folds, so I looked at some games such as Overwatch, Fortnite, and Borderlands for reference.

Here’s my Pureref reference board:

In order to make the clothing feel rugged and worn down, I needed to create a lot of imperfections in the details. Things like loose patches, tight creases and torn off cloth all help contribute to the rugged feel of the sculpt.

I mainly used ZBrush for sculpting the folds in the clothing. My approach was to create the general shape of the pants in a low subdivision, while sculpting the creases in 2-3 subdivisions higher. Using different subdivisions is generally a great way to control the sharpness of the folds you’re creating. To sculpt folds, I mainly used the DamStandard brush with low intensity.

I found some great reference for stylized pants which helped me decide where to place the folds.

Sculpting Head

The egg head was an interesting challenge. Because I wanted a lot of control over the thickness of the shell, I simply modeled a base in Maya. I modeled half a sphere, extruded it, and fine-tuned the shape with soft-select.

I wanted the egg and the material to stand out, so I sculpted a stylized egg surface in ZBrush. For the exploded shell pieces, I simply masked a piece of the egg and extruded it. Additionally, you can ZRemesh the new piece and reproject to obtain cleaner topology. I used this same technique for creating the patches on the pants.

Topology

I decided to make the character game-ready, this meant I needed a lower poly-count. The sculpt was around 12 million polys, but after retopology it ended up being 25k polys.

Additionally, the character was supposed to be animated, so it required a decent topology to deform nicely. The main tool I use for retopology is Quad Draw in Maya. A goal of mine was to maintain the silhouette in the retopology, so I made sure the quads followed the shape of the biggest folds.

Materials

The purpose of this project was to create a strong PBR piece. Though I think 3D Coat is a great hand-painting tool due to its connection with Photoshop, I prefer Substance Painter because of its focus on PBR texturing. I also think its procedural generators are very helpful when creating worn-down materials.

Creating a variety of different materials was a fun challenge. The detailed surface materials were all created using tiling textures. For the denim pants, I first found a clear image of denim, then painted over the texture in Photoshop to match the style, and finally made it tileable (using Filter>Other>Offset).

An equally important part of texturing is presenting it well. Things like "Are my tiling textures too small?" and "Is the lighting properly showing my roughness/glossiness?" should be on your mind.

Presentation

I decided to use Marmoset Toolbag to render the animation and T-pose. Marmoset has great features such as subsurface scattering which I used for the hands and the eggshell. I also used microfibers on the chicken and the cloth which resulted in a soft effect similar to fresnel.

I love breathing life into my characters, so I like to push my characters by animating them. This was something I had to decide from the start because it required me to sculpt the character in a neutral pose. This made it quite easy to rig, create controls, and add subtle animations in Maya.

After the animations were finished, I imported the character + rig into Marmoset and set up an animated turntable with basic lighting.

1 of 2

Retrospective

Overall, this project was a really fun challenge. Working from a concept with few details was a very educational experience. It forced me to work out the style and come up with interesting shapes myself.

Additionally, because of the switch from diffuse-only to PBR, I have become more aware of utilizing the roughness map. Having a lot of contrast in the roughness map will help make the difference in materials more apparent and interesting. 

Afterword

Anyways, I hope this inspires you to make something new! I’d like to thank Tim Moreels for inspiring me to do a full PBR project and giving me feedback along the way.

You can find me on Artstation and Twitter. Feel free to send me a message if you have any questions!

Manuel Sitompul, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

Join discussion

Comments 1

  • Anonymous user

    Fun character concept and great execution! Thanks for the overview. I would like to see more about your approach to stylized texturing in SP.

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·4 years ago·

You might also like

We need your consent

We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more