Digital Sculpt - Thaddeus the Mystical Tortoise
Sculpting - Retopology - Surfacing - Rigging - Lighting and Rendering
What was the project?
This project was a creature I designed called Thaddeus who was designed over a couple of weeks and went through the process of 2D to 3D render. In this project I used a lot of software, starting with photoshop for 2D and references, to Zbrush, Maya, Substance Painter and finally rendering in Unreal Engine 5.3.2.
Designing Thaddeus
When initially designing Thaddeus I wanted him to be unique, not just in backstory but also in silhouette. I started by gathering references off a variety of animals and started studying their environments and eating habits. From this I started to ideate further into muscle anatomy and how Thaddeus would eat, what he would eat etc. From this I started thinking about bone structure, skin density and muscle density. This provided me a good structure to head into Zbrush and start working digitally.
Zbrush
Working in Zbrush was great and I handled it pretty well. It was a great software to work in and great to push my skills in a direction I was not familiar with. Translating Thaddeus into 3D was a bit challenging for me but using the tools available in Zbrush and having good structure and a plan helped me a lot. Overall working in Zbrush was really fun and I have made it a good tool to have, which I have used to bake information with texturing.
Rendering in Unreal and Building for VR
The hardest part about this model was the retopology and rigging. For the scope of the project we needed to bring the topology down to around 10,000 tris. After my retopology I got it around 11,000 triangles but due to nature of Thaddeus, with his shell especially, was quite challenging to do. I used quad draw within Maya to retopologies, but I also could've used Zremesher, with later learning. However, using quad draw let me have full control over the topology, which came handy with rigging.
With rigging I didn't need to do a full rig but however I needed to weight paint and align all my joints correctly so that I could pose it. I also made controls for the rig to help me pose and not alter the adjustments to the bone joints.
Once the texturing and baking had finished, I imported Thaddeus into Unreal and rendered out a cinematic which looked great for being so little in triangles. If I had to go back, to improve the performance a little more I could've reduced the draw calls by having a singular material instead of 2 or 3. Overall I love the creature I created and even got the pleasure for him to be 3D printed!
