Transform a quick concept into an amazing final render
Scott Denton breaks down his character creation process, from initial concept to stunning final render
Character artist Scott Denton showcases his super cool sci-fi render, and details his step-bystep creation process
To begin, I in no way consider myself a great concept artist. It’s something I do for fun, mostly to try to learn more and push my understanding of anatomy and other aspects of character/ creature creation. While I’ll even admit that this project itself is in no way a perfect example of my anatomy knowledge, it was a fun exercise and I wanted to experiment with different forms to see if I could make it work. Delving into the themes of this piece, such as Lovecraft or Princess Of Mars, has been a great joy over the course of this creation process.
While we all need to expand our skills in order to become better artists and succeed in our careers, we must remember that for most of us, we got into this for the love of it and having fun. Trying new ideas and pushing our art can be helpful for mentally tackling our day-to-day jobs and building skills that strengthen them. This tutorial covers the looseness of what it should be like to create a concept final image for the fun of it, and then being able to hopefully translate those skills elsewhere later on.
You’ll see me using some techniques that allow me to save time while avoiding some of the pitfalls I dislike about creating in 3D, like using Mixamo for posing.
01 CONCEPTING
For this project, we start off with a theme – in this case I was inspired to create something alienlike or from the Cthulhu universe. To start out and get my mind going in the right direction for this concept, I decided not to rely too heavily on reference. Instead, I tried to stay loose and just find shapes that I enjoy at this stage, and then bring references in at a later time to make them work correctly. For me, the theme made me immediately
think of the Princess Of Mars books, which led to the John Carter movies mixed with a little Lovecraftian vibe.
02 PEER REVIEW
I begin to see a lot of bad anatomy emerge at this stage and want to start to make corrections. At this point I often ask some friends for modelling advice. Peer review and critique are always a great way to hone in your art and get fresh eyes on something that you might not have seen. This part of the process helps me learn where I might have gone wrong. Oftentimes, I’ll go into Photoshop and draw my own markups and ask friends to do so as well. The first image is done by my buddy Sadan Vague and the second by my buddy Arda Koyuncu.
03 FURTHER REFINING
After receiving some great feedback and criticism from my peers I then go back to the drawing board. This process is very similar to what we do when concepting an actual job. I grab some more references to aid in shaping the direction that I want to end up in. This helps me to hone in more on the distinct styles and characteristics I will explore for the final character.
04 FINAL GEO
After some evolution of the creature I decided that this is the direction I want to go in. I then start to retopo all given parts for the final piece. I use Maya and Zremesher to accomplish this stage.
05 UVS
For this part I use a combination of Maya’s UV tools and some quick UVS using UV Master in Zbrush. Usually for film I concentrate on a UDIM workflow, but for this we are going to be doing textures sets.
06 EXPORT FOR SUBSTANCE PAINTER
In this step I usually apply each group their own texture and name the SG accordingly, so that when we bring it into Substance the naming correlates to the Texture Set name.
07 RENAME FOR EASY EXPORT
Usually when I’m exporting to Substance Painter, I like to make duplicates of my geo and rename them; so if our base geo naming is Axe_geo, our low duplicate would be Axe_low. I usually use Comet Renamer to accomplish this across all pieces of geo. I then export the low as FBX. I also do the same in Zbrush, but rename all the objects where it says ‘low’ to ‘high’, and use this to import in our Substance file.
I am using Opengl, as we will be rendering with Arnold in Maya.
08 BAKE IN SUBSTANCE
After importing into Substance Painter we can go into the Baking menu located under the Texture Set Settings. Open the Bake Mesh Maps menu. I set the output size to 4k, as I like having them baked to have that size readily available at export. In the highdefinition menu load your High FBX exported out from Zbrush. We change Match to By Mesh Name, so that when it looks to bake it only looks for the low/high syntax so that each object bakes to itself.
09 POSE WITH MIXAMO, CORRECT IN ZBRUSH
Since I am not a fan of posing my creatures I usually rely on Mixamo for quick results that I can then go back and refine in Zbrush. After exporting it out as an FBX file from Mixamo I’ll bring it into Maya so I can export each part out individually as an OBJ file. Then we can re-import them into the corresponding parts inside of Zbrush, taking on the detail we’ve already laid down on the base sculpt and mesh, but in the posed position. Now we can start roughing out our Maya scene.
10 EXPORT AVATAR FOR MARVELOUS DESIGNER
For this step we want to use Zbrush’s Transpose Master plugin to make all our pieces one object, so that we can export it as OBJ to bring into Marvelous Designer. After we get it into Marvelous we
make a quick pattern, set up some pins and run the sim. Export the Pattern Geo back to Zbrush.
11 ADD THICKNESS AND NEW TOPOLOGY
For our purposes we just want to run a quick Zremesh on the cape; as we won't be using this for animation, the final topology doesn’t really matter. First though I want to tweak it with some of the Cloth brushes to give it a little more flow. We'll be using the Clothmovebrush for this. Now we can Zremesh.
After this, let’s give it a little thickness by using Zmodeler. We want to have extrude turned on and polygroup all, and then extrude it to the desired thickness.
12 COMPOSE THE ENVIRONMENT
I want my character to look victorious, as if he has just conquered a battle on an alien world. I'm going to rely on some Megascans for this environment. After I find the correct elements, I import them into Maya, duplicate and place them for the correct filling out of the composition.
13 REFINE THE SCULPT IN POSE
Back in Zbrush I'll use Transpose Master to refine the pose and fix any issues caused by the Mixamo rig. We will also adjust any anatomy that would change in said pose refining of the sculpt.
14 BAKE IN SUBSTANCE PAINTER
Now we’ll bring the character and its parts into Substance Painter and begin to bake and lay down the base textures. Once we have achieved a result we like we can export the textures.
15 EXPERIMENT WITH LIGHTING
At this stage l start to bring everything back into Maya and begin testing the lighting. If you aren't familiar with the plugin Zoo Tools by Andrew Silke and the team over at Create3dcharacters.com, you should check it out. It is pretty much my go-to start for every project. I can test lighting scenarios quickly and find a direction I want to go in (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zoh_e1qdup8).
16 ADD TEXTURES
Once we find our final image angle we lock the pose and start to add in our textures exported from Substance Painter. Since we are using Arnold Renderer, we are going to use the aistandardsurface shader for each of the texture sets. After applying the shaders
let’s locate each exported file. We have Diffuse, Roughness, Metallic and Normal maps. Once we've imported them in, we plug them into the graph the way they are intended. When plugging in the Diffuse the colour space is SRGB, but for Normal, Roughness and Metallic, change it to Raw.
17 ROUGHNESS AND METALLIC LUMINANCE
For both Roughness and Metallic, expand Color Balance and turn on the ‘Alpha is luminance’ option for both of them. Once we get our final result we render out the passes and put them together, adjusting different blending modes and tweaking the hue and saturation, as well as darkening areas and adding more to our background, creating a test composite.
18 FINAL IMAGE
Now we’ve come to our final image, the full 5k render. With a little compositing magic back in Photoshop, we compile the background layer, using found elements and some photobashing to get the background we like. •