3D Character Creation - Baking, Texturing, Rendering


Baking

Baking was a constant back-and-forth in trying to get the right amount of max frontal/rear distance. Thankfully most of this process was somewhat less arduous however, I did come across some issues where I had to troubleshoot things by going back and adjusting UVs and coming back to see if there were bleeding/"melting" issues.



 Texturing


 
Testing my own paintings from above to be used as Eye_Texture stamps





To make Textures: Handpainted Style
Fill Layer = Roughness Max
Fill Layer + Black + Mask + Generator (Either dirt and/or metal edge) +Blur Slope

Blur Slope is an incredibly underrated and important part of the handpainted style as its parameters allow you to adjust and create the illusion of handpainted textures, this filter helped diffuse the harshness of the generators.  

I played with ambient occlusion (generator) and position, to make sure that there were textures even where I was not painting. I wanted to make sure that the base colours themself were speckled with a brush texture.  You can see an example down below: I followed this like a recipe
I paint and often do colour studies. For this ground plane, I took inspiration from Marco Bucci, using soft light to enhance the ambient light.  
Marco Bucci's painterly style




This is the Elf fully textured.



Lighting
Probably the most infuriating part of the pipeline as the stakes are high, but we move on. In this part of the process, everything had been textured and fine-tuned the only thing that remained was lighting. In conjunction with my hard surface model, 

I wanted a soft sunset, saturated with orange to go with the theme of an Elf calmly travelling at Dusk or Dawn. To achieve this, I plugged in an HDRI as a skydome --> added two area lights, one which provided a clearer white light but diffused in its value and an area light saturated in a soft orange from the back to indicate a sunset. I like how the colours of the lighting enhanced the textures/ambience of the Elf without obscuring it. 


Rendering
Rendering is a strenuous task; in Arnold render settings I played with diffuse, specular and camera settings to achieve as little noise. I used an oidin denoiser to help clear trouble areas. However, it is worth mentioning that the texture of the boots being of a sort of canvas would often give the impression noise but using arnold render preview with 3d manipulation helped alleviate areas of concern. 

Final Character Renders





Final Thoughts when wrapping up
I believe I spent too much time on sculpting and modelling which rendered me with very little time for the very important phases of the character which would be the texturing, lighting and rendering. I underestimated the necessity to compose the character in good lighting and be able to render all UV, Wireframe, and beauty passes. For future modelling, I will reduce the time taken to detail and be more assertive with moving to the next phases. I aim to learn more about modelling detailed hair and will be looking at xgen to evolve the modelling abilities I have now. I really enjoyed texturing and sculpting the character, I found that this area of 3D Creation stood out to me and I am going to be familiarising myself with skills around Character creation, Visual development and Concepts. 


Around the time I had finished modelling the Character, I started the hard surface model which I connected to the Elf, and designed a, 'A windmill home in a glass jar' memento. 


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