Vesper

Goals

I worked with a team member and prominent souls community figure ZullieTheWitch, we had voice acting done already for a character.
She’s meant to be a traveling wanderer from another time/place searching for someone. The idea was a bow/ranger character, but I wanted to do something more interesting.

The character has a relation to white trees and magic so I wanted her to have this crossbow made of partially pale white wood. It’s a common trope of pavise shields paired with crossbows, so I went in on a theme there. You’ll also notice there’s a prominent Owl theme attached to her, which also has something to do with some character context I won’t go into.

I intended her to have a kind of downcast royal look, someone who’s aristocratic but gets her hands dirty, she has fine clothes underneath this kind of bronze-age leather armor, the armor seemingly recent build but ancient. The armor was being fashioned for her. She needed to have a weird mix of I guess late medieval and early medieval.

Software

I used primarily Zbrush for all modeling including hard surface elements. I don’t really think of modeling in terms of “hard surface”. To me, all hard surfaces are just condensed soft surfaces. You can model anything in zbrush, I find resorting to polygonal topological modeling only really benefical when you need something that maintains a clean flow in final.

To me, this is for blades where you want a clean edge flow, cloth sections where you need UVs to work with patterns, etc.
Most of the character was modeled with Dynamesh/Sculptris.

References & Inspiration

There’s an armor/character from the original Demon’s Souls that I always loved, called Selen Vinland. She has this really great Gallic kinda looking winged helmet and dull golden armor with prominent leather, I always wanted to make something like that so this character started off emulating her a little.

I wanted to make it clear not to be a “valkyrie” as winged helmets etc don’t really have anything to do with them, people tend to think everything is Viking or Gothic and there’s actually a lot of in-between. I like to study a lot of cultural elements, the Byzantine Empire, the Celts, Saxons, Assyrians, the interesting transitions that occur between Persian/Ottoman/Greek, etc in terms of cultural styles.

There are a lot of interesting cultural elements rarely tapped into by artists, most opting for these big fantasy plates or gothic spikes on everything, they think “Fromsoft Style” means just gothic knights when this isn’t the case.

Blockout & Modelling

Most people work in this mindset of Large > Mid > Small i.e. tertiary details etc, and such ideas have never made sense to me. Often to me, working on details can drive larger shapes in reverse, sometimes starting with larger shapes pigeonholes you into sticking inside a box you’ve made for yourself, artists are often scared to smash up the clean topology plates they’ve made.

I’m not precious with geometry at all, I bulldoze it, pull it push it decimate it add more geo till I get where I need to be. I work on fine detail, large shapes, and everything in between all at the same time because I don’t think any aspect of it is mutually exclusive. That’s just me though.

Modelling Techniques

For sculpting I don’t really mess with fine detail much in the high poly, as I find baking this info in is kind of destructive, and I think textures and smart material work can do all this much better and more dynamically.

I like to think more about how the curvature will bake on the surface, and give it enough interest to drive the curvature map so that I can then later decide what I want to do there. Maybe I want something to be wooden instead of metal?

Sometimes the opposite. If I gave something all this obvious wood grain in the ZBrush, well then I have to do it in textures. For the crossbow, for instance, I couldn’t decide till the very end if I was doing a wooden body or a metal-plated one, etc. I decided on textures based on what felt right.

I only do finer detail on elements I’m sure of the material like leather/cloth etc. I never add scratches or cuts to metal in ZBrush, because I don’t trust that I may actually want that there in the final. I prefer again to let textures handle that.

I do all retopology in 3DS Max, vertex by vertex filling everything with quads/tris as I need. I found the time it takes for me to draw strips or mess with auto-generated stuff I never quite get what I need and always find myself sitting there adjusting things too much, so even if it takes a bit longer initially I prefer to just intend every vert of my low poly where I see it.

Marvelous Designer & Clothing

The cloth here was in 3DS Max and Zbrush and is admittedly very simple, the cloth wasn’t a major feature here, it’s meant to be quite a plain-looking tunic as there are a lot of other things and layering going on, I didn’t want a super busy cloth pattern thing to muddy it up here.

UVing

3DS Max has pretty standard UV tools, but they get the job done. The modifier stack in conjunction with UV work is something often overlooked, it’s a major strength of the Max workflow. Every time you add an Edit Poly or Unwrap modifier you’re essentially capturing a state, you can have all these mesh edit/UV permutations saved in your layer stack this way and not need to constantly duplicate your meshes.

I find working in other software just a giant pile of headaches with too much of my time spent hiding/unhiding and reorganizing things. Often times I’ll create temporary UV’s in a modifier stack layer just to have easy face selections. There are many tiny little things I forget I even do.

Baking

I do all baking within Substance Painter, I don’t see the need to do it anywhere else if my goal is to texture within painter.
I just wish the program had controls for cages and distance stuff in a real-time visual sense as Marmoset does.

Materials & Texturing

I’m a self-professed substance painter pro but I don’t really show it off or go into it much, but I’ve been working with very complex anchor point setups since the beginning. All of the leather and metal work etc is done with painting on 1 or 2 Paint Layers, the rest is generated.

I have many stacked and nested chains of anchors feeding into others, it’s very performance expensive but I get something that looks good almost immediately just by dropping the material on.

Rigging

I only have experience with rigging in 3DS Max, and very basic at that. I use CATRig which is native to Max and allows for procedural animation work. The walk cycles and feet stuff is all done procedurally. I hand-keyframed all animations for the portfolio piece otherwise.

Polish & Final pass

I did a lot of tweaking and redoing of textures and animation stuff mostly, skinning for me is a headache as it’s the harder part in Max compared to other software I believe.

Lighting

Lighting is incredibly important to me to get striking looks and images. I’m always over analyzing and thinking about every aspect, how the light will hit the elbow in this shot and frame it poorly, trying to make sure it’s readable and shadows and lighting don’t combine in a mess to make it unclear what you’re even looking at.

For a piece like this where she’s covered in lots of bits and pieces I had to make special care with lighting to get it right or it could look like a big mess.

Rendering

Rendering was done in Marmoset Toolbag, I prefer to just work in real time. I’m not after perfect CGI renders, these are meant to look like they’re from a game or something achievable. If you can see some clipping or stretching or odd quirks to me I don’t care too much, I’m not going to kill myself for perfection that way, my artwork isn’t meant to be seen as a still frame on a wall.

The intention is this stuff will be in a game setting people can play mostly.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading I hope the article was helpful!