Craft stylised Characters
Victor Hugo gives us an insight into his process for developing an original character, with a stepby-step guide from concept to post-production
Victor Hugo teaches us how to create his stunning cover characters inspired by Celtic culture
i’ve been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and it caught my attention how Aloy is such a great and strong character, just like another character I love, Lagertha (Vikings). Having those two strong women in mind I decided to give it a shot and try to create my own strong female warrior! My initial idea was to create a Frank Frazetta tribute but with the characters swapped (strong woman with a guy holding her legs), but after some research development I thought it would be cooler to do something Celtic-related. Celtic women had way more freedom of activity and protection under law than other cultures, so a Celtic female warrior would be something fun to create and would have a lot of historical background to support my character.
In this tutorial I’ll cover my approach and talk about things like knowing your foundations, expanding your mindset and working in a non-destructive way (especially for look development). I’ll also be doing the shading and rendering using Corona Renderer 1.7, which has some cool new features like hair and dedicated skin shaders.
01 find your character AND where it belongs
First and foremost, if you want to create a good character you need to place it somewhere. Where’s it from? Where is it going? What do they do? It’s easier to develop your character if you have a solid base. More important than details, having the overall is essential to build up a character and gather references. So with that in mind I knew that my character would be a strong woman (like a weightlifter or a Crossfit athlete), Celtic (so she lives in cold places and uses Celtic weapons, like an axe) and was definitely someone confident and empowered. I also thought it would be fun if she had an assistant, like a young shield bearer. It’s fun to imagine how they could interact on their adventures.
02 from big to small
When I start to create an illustration, a character or even a prop, I like to start by blocking all the major information, and from that I work on passes to add details. This mindset works on every development aspect. In Zbrush, you don’t want to start adding all those details if you don’t even have a proper base, right? So my first step was to find the characters and decide on a proper composition. For the characters I used some base meshes from older models as a starting point and played with the proportions in Zbrush. After that I exported back to 3ds Max and roughly posed them in order to find a good composition. The goal here isn’t to have the ‘final look’, but to have a solid starting point.
03 Modelling frazette
Yes, I called her Frazette because of my discarded idea. I kind of liked the name! So, with a good starting point (composition and characters roughly blocked), it’s finally time to work on elements individually. Since Frazette is the main element of my illustration, I decided that everything else would be done based on her.
I started on Frazette in the same way as the overall aspect (from big to small). I started with gathering references (and reading about them), and then I blocked out her armour and weapon. Since my goal was to create a strong female with a more grounded design, I tried to understand how certain elements work, for example: chest plates. I learned that chest plates usually have an angular design because the main goal is to deflect a blade hit. So, learning that kind of information helped me a lot when it came to blocking all the armour pieces in 3ds Max. This part of the process is pretty straightforward polygon modelling. Usually I start from a plane (arm and leg plates, shoes, belts) or extract the polygons from the body as a starting point (chest plate, shirt, waistband). After everything is blocked and I’m happy with the overall design, I do another pass and add secondary information (buckles, boot design, bracelet, armband and so on).
04 uvs
When it comes to creating UVS, what I do to speed up the process is to create the seams in 3ds Max (sometimes I also use Uvlayout), export to Zbrush using GOZ and then use Zbrush’s UV Master. It’s a quick and really effective pipeline. After that I organise the UVS into UDIM groups, separating them by similar materials (with a group for rubber/leather, another for metals, another one for fabric and so on).
05 the Armour
In Zbrush I used the Flatten brush to break the clean shape of the armour and the Slash3 and Clay
brushes to add some damage to it, but I knew that creating the armour design in Zbrush definitely wouldn’t be the best solution.
Since I was creating the design at the same time, my solution was to sketch the design in Zbrush using a polypaint brush, export the sketch as a texture, and from that create a vector and apply some layer effects in Photoshop to transform it on a displacement map. By working that way I would have a non-destructible art that could be easily replicated and adjusted. At one point I wanted to move the chest plate design a few centimetres up, and it would be really painful to move or scale things if I had just modelled them straight in Zbrush.
After finishing all the details and the design, it’s time to create textures! My main texture tool is Substance Painter. I really like how you can do things procedurally or non-destructive in it. I usually start working from zero. As much as presets are great time savers, it tends to look too generic since it’s a multi-purpose material, so I like to build up my materials from scratch in Substance Painter.
When you are creating your material try to always have a reference and make sure you understand your material. The armour, for example, is a multilayered shader, since we have the base metal, damages (edge wear, surface scratches) and aging features (leaking marks, stains, dust). When I’m satisfied with the actual look of it, I export the maps using the Corona Preset, which exports all of the necessary maps ready to use in Corona. Well, sort of.
Remember when I said ‘multilayered’? I always avoid using textures straight from Substance Painter. What I do is extract the textures without the dust layer, extract the dust mask from Substance Painter as a texture and use it as a Coronalayeredmtl alpha. I think it looks more natural to have dust acting as it would in reality (a material layered over other material). Software like Substance Painter came to make our life easier, not lazier.
Another thing that I do is fine-tune my shaders using the Coronaoutput map. It’s a really powerful tool if you need to finetune your maps, especially if you use it with Corona’s Interactive Render. It’s almost real-time tuning, depending on your PC specs!
06 the skin
For the skin I use pretty much the same process that I described for the armour. Keep it non-destructive and you’re safe to tweak it as much as you like it. Sometimes we note something later down the road and we feel like, ‘oh man, I’m going have to redo a lot to fix this… nah, I’ll leave it like that, it’s a small thing’, but imagine if you did that five, ten times? The small thing becomes a big thing and you sacrificed your work because fixing something would mean doing it all over again. So always try to keep things non-destructive.
Try to look at references so you can see colour zones, like reddish tone for the cheeks, nose and finger tips, yellow on the forehead and collarbone, blueish for the eye bags area and so on. You can also add a tileable skin texture to blend all the colours and a procedural texture from Substance to add an extra variation on the skin tones.
I like to say that I am an SSS enthusiast. When I heard that Corona had a new skin material, I definitely needed to check it out! It turns out that it feels like a volumetric scattering shader, but it is still optimised to be artist-
friendly and with good render times. It’s a really straightforward shader with two specular channels and three subsurface scattering layers. All I had to do was plug my Diffuse texture in the overall Color, my Glossiness texture in the Glossiness slot and tweak the SSS colour and radius. It doesn’t take much to get a good-looking SSS for your character skin!
Frazette has some dirt on her face and fingernails, so I employed the same technique that I used on the armour: export the clean shader, export the dirt alpha and apply it as a Coronalayeredmtl alpha for the dirt texture and her body paint.
07 clothing
Frazette has two types of clothing: the leather and the torn cloth on her hip. Since her trousers and top are made of a tight cloth, I was able to sculpt the folds in Zbrush. For the torn cloth piece I used 3ds Max Cloth Simulation with some wind in order to give it a more natural look. The edges are an opacity texture and I also added some micro fur using Ornatrix, the best 3ds Max grooming solution in my opinion.
Since her cloth has a lot of leather, I tried to add some colour and glossiness variation between the pieces. Also, for the trouser stitching I used Zbrush to make the seams and Substance Painter to paint the stitches. For the stitches I usually create a new fill layer and use a stitch brush on the mask, so I can fine-tune the stitch colour after. All the design details were done in Photoshop and then applied in Substance Painter using the Projection tool.
08 Hair grooming
I first considered making an undercut hairstyle, but when I was searching for references I found some pretty awesome mohawks, which I thought would be a better way to add a fierce and strong personality to my character.
When grooming I first try to break the hair in parts (shaved part, mohawk and transition area) and work each part as a different object. It’s easier to manage that way. When creating the hair using Ornatrix, I start by moulding an overall shape using Ox Edit Guides, define some big clumps using Strand Groups and the Ox Strand Clustering modifier, medium clumps using Ox Hair Clustering and smaller groups with another Ox Hair Clustering. I usually add some frizz, length variation and multiply some strands to create even more variation.
The hair shader is pretty straightforward. It’s Coronahairmtl with three different variations: rootto-top colour variation (Gradient Ramp map using WU as coordinate); clumps colour variation (mix your base colour with a brighter gradient map, with a noise texture as mask); and strand colour variation (random melanin parameter on hair shader).
09 the importance of the eyes
I read once in a tutorial made by a great artist called Jose Alves da Silva that you should spend some good time working on your character’s eyes, because “it’s all in the eyes.” You can convey how someone’s feeling by the look in their eyes, so never underestimate the importance of your character’s eyes. What I always do is make sure that the iris has specular on the lower part, some nice reflections on the cornea (especially on darker areas like the upper part of the iris and pupil) and tint the pupil instead of using pitch black. For the inner geometry I used two materials: for the sclera I use Coronaskinmtl for some quick SSS, and Coronamtl for the iris. For the outer part it’s simply a Coronamtl with refraction and reflection (like a glass) with very little glossiness on the reflection (so it won’t look 100 per cent like glass and also adds a specular highlight).
10 pose the Model
Sometimes our first idea isn’t the best one, so we need to keep experimenting and trying new things. I do this with every step of the process, including posing. I know a thing or two about rigging, but it’s time consuming and I don’t really enjoy it. My main solution is to use an autorig tool called LH Autorig. It’s a pretty good rig, especially if you’re working with still images. For skinning I like to use Bonespro, as it speeds up the skinning process
a lot. This process usually takes one hour, which is much faster than starting a rig from scratch and is easier to tweak than when using Zbrush’s Transpose tool.
When I’m fully satisfied with the pose, I send it to Zbrush so I can fix proportions and bad-looking joints.
11 environment
It’s pretty common nowadays to use scanned textures in order to achieve better results in less time, and thanks to new technology it’s becoming common to use scanned people and objects to speed things up. For the ground I used a base model from Quixel Megascans and created new textures to fit my needs (it had a forest appearance, and I wanted a winter mountain look).
Even being a really good model, the scan itself will look ‘too 3D’ if you don’t add more details, so for that I decided to scatter some smaller rocks across the surface using Corona Scatter, some moss using Ornatrix, snow using Coronadisplacementmod and hand-placed tuft grass, bigger rocks and bushes.
For the scattered rocks across the surface, I first duplicated the geometry and deleted everything from except from the top surface. I made that by creating an top light map in Substance Painter and using it as a texture map input for the Vol. Select modifier. After that I used that surface as a Corona Scatter distribution object and then used a distribution map to create small groups of rocks, instead of having an even distribution.
For the snow I started with the same process as the scattered rocks (optimising the geometry using a map generated in Substance Painter) and then I used the Coronadisplacementmod with the Water Level option enabled. This way only the displaced geometry will appear, leaving the rest invisible. It’s a quick way to have naturallooking snow over an irregular surface, as a different geometry and a different shader.
12 lighting AND rendering
For the lighting my goal was to achieve a cold sunny day. There’s also a variant version of the image
featuring blizzard weather, but we decided to go for the sunny day instead (it had better contrast for the cover layout). I used two light sources: a desaturated orange/ yellow main sun light and a blueish rim light, both with Corona Light but using different Directionality values (0 for the rim light and 0.55 for the sun), so I could have a nice and soft rim light and an HDRI as an environment light. When using HDRI, try to use a Coronaoutput and play with Gamma values. It’s pretty cool how many different results you can achieve by only changing that one value.
Corona has an amazing tool called Lightmix which gives us freedom to fine-tune the lighting after (and during) the render. It’s easy to set up (you just have to press a button) and it’s really powerful, so always use this tool to your advantage. Don’t forget to create some render element passes like RGB masks – they’re really useful in post-production.
Rendering nowadays is really artist-friendly, and Corona does a great job in making that part good to go, so I honestly don’t even click on the Performance tab.
13 post-production
I usually break up my postproduction into three separate steps: fix what’s wrong, equalise the image and then do the colour grading/post VFX.
It’s pretty common to spot something interpenetrating or floating after you do your final render, so take some time nitpicking it. After that, zoom out, take a step back and look at the overall. Is your work equalised? Is there any colour jumping out from your palette or something that could use more contrast (usually metals)? Ask for a friend with fresh eyes to evaluate your work, they might be able to spot things that you never noticed. The next step is the colour grading: I usually play around with curves, selective colour and vibrance/ saturation. As always, try to have a reference for this.
The last step is to add lens effects like light reflection, sun glare, vignette and grain. Those things help to blend your image and give it a more natural look.