Initial Idea

For this assignment, we were tasked with creating a character that could fit in and perform in a movie or cinematic. And immediately I knew I wanted to do some sort of sea creature for my character, since I knew there was no drought for inspiration with the number of fish species’ I could draw from.

I played around with a few ideas in my head, and I decided that I wanted to do some sort of siren/mermaid type creature. But since the brief stated that our character had to be designed to fit a set of parameters (being a script or thematic criteria), I knew I had to come up with a story that would help influence my design. So I had to decide some basic things about what my character was – for example, I decided that I wanted my character to be a predator in it’s environment. I had this vision of an angular, sharp and sickly thin creature, with it’s bones protruding through it’s skin, so I knew I’d be leaning into more of a horror/monster type of character.

Then, for the world building, I had to decide what type of environment I wanted my character to live in. For this I looked into different parts of the ocean – such as the Great Barrier Reef which I thought I was going to take the most inspiration from but I found the more images and references I gathered, the less if felt it suited my character. So to fit with the horror vibe I had in my head, I decided that I wanted my siren to live in the deep part of the ocean and I took inspiration from places like The Mariana Trench, which is the deepest underwater trench in the Western Pacific.

Research

With my idea set in my head, I took to gathering research. I looked into different types of fish that live in the deep parts of the ocean and their characteristics.

The first one I looked at, and the species that sparked this idea in the first place, was an anglerfish. I felt like their frightening appearance perfectly matched the aesthetic I was going for but looking deeper into it, the anatomy and characteristics didn’t match the vision in my head. For example, they typically have a rounder, fatter body shape and that contrasted the thin, sharp figure I envisioned in my head. However, I found out that the colour scheme of an anglerfish – dark browns and greys – are used to aid in camouflaging themselves in the deep sea and I liked the idea of my character being able to blend into their environment.

I then read about a prehistoric creature called a Frilled Shark. Frilled Sharks have an eel like appearance, with slender, elongated bodies alongside a broad, flat head, and this matched the vision in my head perfectly. 

I also looked into the anatomy of fish in general, just so my creature could feel like it belonged in an underwater setting. I knew it had to have scales, gills, webbed hands maybe. But I researched into different types of fins specifically. I wanted my creature to have a homocercal tail, as that tail structure is suited for swimming long distances and enables fish to achieve high speeds and manurer swiftly in pursuit of prey.

Taking this research into account, I came up with two ideas. One that heavily referenced an angler fish, incorporating its overgrown dorsal fin light, and much more masculine.

And the other one taking more inspiration from the Frilled Shark, with a more feminine design.

 

In the end, I chose the one inspired by the Frilled Shark.

Blocking/Retopology

Moving onto actually creating the model, I decided to block my character in Blender as I found the familiar software quicker and easier to use, and I wanted to have a good base to work with before I moved on to Zbrush. For this, I just stuck to defining the basic shapes of my creature before taking into sculpt mode to refine the details a bit more.

I got a bit confused as to when in the pipeline you retopologise, and I got mixed answers when I asked my fellow classmates, but I decided ultimately that it was best for my own personal pipeline to retopologise before sculpting as to not lose any detail later when I import the FBX into Zbrush. When retopologising, I decided it was best to take each part of the body separate from each other to keep myself right. So I started with the part that had the most area to cover which was the tail which was actually easy enough to complete. I found that the struggle actually came when doing the torso and back of the creature. I was so focused on getting this done that I forgot to check for triangles. This caused many problems later on when I imported the first FBX into Zbrush and my mesh was entirely broken. So I went back into Blender and redid the entire back and shoulder area.

This was easily the longest part of the process. Retopologising the whole model took me about three days of solid work to complete.

Sculpting/Zbrush

I was very excited to try Zbrush when I first installed it, however I quickly learned that it was nothing like Blender’s sculpt mode and I struggled a lot at the start. Even with the practice work, I often had to close the program down and restart the whole thing because I just couldn’t get it down – this is the main reason I blocked out my model in blender. But now, even though I am still very clunky at it, I can say that sculpting was my favourite part of this process.

To start, I worked on making the ribs and spine visible through the skin, using the standard brush and smooth tool. I also wanted to give my creature some scars to further flesh out that it is a predator in an unsafe environment, so I did this on the face, across the eye and on the tail using the crease tool. I then used the noise tool to add some texture to the skin as I wanted to make it leathery and rough.

Adding a subdivision level, I moved onto the finer details, particularly playing around with textures and alphas for the scales. I found various free alphas online and chose two that I wanted to use.

I also found one that I thought could add to the leathery texture of the skin

When it came to sculpting the hair, this is where I struggled the most. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make it look organic and natural and not like a solid block. Henry uploaded some hair texture alphas onto blackboard and I downloaded one of these to help during sculpting but I still think I could’ve worked harder on it.

Texturing

The model really started to come together when I began texturing.

After unwrapping the UV’s in Zbrush, I exported the FBX into Substance Paint where I baked the normal maps by overlapping a low resolution FBX with a high resolution one. And since my creature was already heavily textured in Zbrush when I was sculpting, I decided that I was just going to paint the colours onto my model rather than add any more texture.

Using an ambient occlusion map to emphasise the shadows on my character and give it a more dark and menacing feel, and using a generator and a grime noise map I made it so it looked like there was slight skin discolouration that would come with the lighting underwater. For the colours, as I said, I was heavily influenced by the colour scheme of an anglerfish – dark browns and greys to fit in with the deep sea environment. However, I still wanted to make the colours pop a little, so I stuck more to green and yellow undertones, making the fins brighter than the rest of the body so that it would be interesting to look at.

I also hand painted most of the details on, such as shadows under the jaw and neck, highlights on the scales and scar tissue across the face and tail.

 

Unreal/Environments

Unlike Zbrush, I was not looking forward to starting Unreal. However, I was shocked to find that I actually really enjoyed creating and sculpting landscapes.

For my environment, I wanted it to be located in the deep sea and I was thinking something like an underwater grotto. So I looked up pictures of underwater terrain to get a feel of how the structures formed, particularly photos from the Mariana Trench which is what I was taking most of the inspiration from. Sharp peaks and deep caverns and lots of sand.

But when looking into the foliage, I found that most deep parts of the sea like things like coral or seaweed, but this made my environment look barren and not in the intentional way I wanted it, so I populated the area with rocks and added a few models of dead stumps which I felt could pass as broken seashells or other types of rocks, with a moss texture to some areas to give the environment some contrast from the sand and basalt and gravel textures that made up the most of my environment. It’s not the most accurate of terrains, but I am proud of how it turned out in the end

 

 

Lighting

I knew from the moment that I decided to do an underwater creature that the lighting of my scene was going to be one of the most important things, and also one of the most difficult. Again, to understand what I wanted my outcome to look like, I went back to the references I had gathered when sculpting my environments to see how the lighting looks in each photo. I noticed that the predominate colours and tones in each reference were blue – obviously – and green.

I used a Sky Atmosphere to give the scene an overall blue/green hue, and I enhanced this with a Post Process Volume to darken the area and give it that deep sea feel. I then used light points coloured both blue and green to enhance the atmosphere.

Something I was very keen to add into my scene was the ripple of lights that cast onto the ocean floor when the sun passes through the water, as I felt this would tie the whole underwater effect together. So I looked up ways that I could add this into Unreal and I found this tutorial

 

Following along, I created a new material function and added it to the light. I then created a second light source and did the same thing, but changed the colour from a blue tone to a green tone, just to emphasis the ripple effect. All in all, I think this turned out very well in my scene and definitely gave it an underwater effect.

Here is what the effect looks like without any additional lighting.

Armature problems

At this point, I was very happy with how my work was going. But, unfortunately, I ran into some problems when it came to the basic step of applying armature and posing the model. Because I sculpted and subdivided in Zbrush so much, when I imported the FBX back into Blender to apply the armature, my laptop got very overwhelmed and the program kept crashing. At the risk of losing detail in the sculpt, I tried to decimate the mesh to take a lot of the faces away but this only made Blender crash more. At a loss of what to do, and time running out, I opted to leave my character unposed and I am greatly disappointed at myself for this decision. I was so proud of my progress so far in this assignment and this crushed me massively and really lowered my opinion on my final product and my work overall.

If I could go back and redo this module, I would try not to subdivide the model in Zbrush so much, or else I would’ve just modelled the character in pose.

Final scene

The problems I faced with the armature left me with little options I could do for my scene, due to the fact that my character was stuck in a basic, static pose. Initially, I wanted the scene to be set up like the camera/viewer was prey and the creature was reaching for it. Unfortunately, in the end I couldn’t do that so I had to go for the most basic option.

Due to this, I’m not very proud of my final outcome. But I took the final render into photoshop and played around with the levels and tone curve to try and adjust the atmosphere and make it look more like it was underwater.

Reflection

In conclusion, I feel like this module was a roller-coaster for me. I started off the semester nervous about learning new softwares as I remember struggling greatly with Blender in first year, but I can say that I am shockingly proud of the progress I made in such little time. Particularly in Zbrush, as I feel my sculpting skills have improved greatly from last years character design module. Similarly, I enjoyed painting my model in Substance. These two parts were probably my favourite to do in the pipeline. I also really enjoyed learning Unreal and getting to create my own landscape. The character itself I think could be improved, design wise. I fear I played it too safe and went too simple and looking back, I wish I did some more exploration sketches to flesh out some more ideas I could’ve chosen from.

My biggest concern going into this module was learning Zbrush. I had enjoyed sculpting on Blender last year, but I quickly found out that Zbrush is vastly different. For the first few weeks, I struggled learning the layout and trying to find everything I needed. Also the navigation keys still mess me up even now at the end of the project. But I have to say, I really enjoyed the sculpting. Especially playing with different alphas and textures. And I am excited to use the software again in the future and better my skills for the industry

Obviously, the biggest downfall of my assignment was the lack of armature and posing. I am so bummed out about this but with the deadline approaching there is nothing I can do. I am upset, because I really enjoyed learning everything in this module and to have the outcome not represent the best work I could’ve produced is crushing. I’ll also say that my lighting in Unreal could have been stronger in some aspects. Like the Sky Dome, I couldn’t really figure out how to edit it to look like a solid colour so the scene ended up looking like a night time scene above water more than an underwater environment. However, I sort of fixed this in photoshop, playing around with the lighting and darkness levels and the hues of the picture.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed at how this project turned out and, knowing what I know now, I wish I could start over in certain aspects so that I could better my model and my scene to the best possible standard.