Technique Focus: Fan art

Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork

Nabil Chequeiq discusses the creation of his Valorant image

I currently work at animation studio Reel FX Animation as a 3D character artist and modeller, doing a variety of modelling tasks such as characters and environment props. However, in my free time I only do characters, because in the future I want to work on a video game cinematic.

FAN ART Phoenix is a character from the first-person shooter Valorant by Riot Games. For the face details, I used HD Geometry in Zbrush after seeing Kris Costa using it in one of his Pixologic presentations – it gives me a lot of freedom in terms of detail and polygons. For the clothes I used Marvelous Designer to block out the general jacket, and then I exported it to Maya and used a script called UV tool. After retopologising I used Transfer Attributes to transfer UVS from the Marvelous mesh to my retopo mesh. Next, I used Transfer Attributes again to transfer vertex positions from UVS to my jacket – this way I had my low-poly jacket mesh matching the high-res one in terms of vertex position and UVS. After all my low-poly elements, I exported that mesh into Zbrush and started projecting the first pass of detail, then adding more to make the jacket interesting.