Making a Space Girl with Blender & SP

Viktor Berendeev prepared a short breakdown of his character Space Girl made with Blender & Substance Painter.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Viktor Berendeev, I am a 3D artist. I started studying this profession as a hobby about 4 years ago.  At the moment, I work at kefirgames studio.

Space Girl

Reference

I really liked the idea of Jun Wang’s sketch, so I deсided make it in 3D. Actually, I wanted to make only a gun at first, but it went further.

Body Elements

The body was sculpted in ZBrush: I usually start with a dynameshed sphere and build a head.

Then, I sculpt the body and polish the details.

For retopology, I usually use Blender, for baking – Marmoset Toolbag and texturing is done in Substance Painter.

For the body material, I plugged the textures I got from Substance Painter.

The head material is based on this tutorial.

Hard-Surface Elements

Armor and all the hard-surface elements were modeled in Blender: I used a polygonal modeling technique combined with the Boolean workflow. I used Hard Ops and DecalMachine which are is amazing Blender add-ons. I really recommend them for every Blender user.

For armor material, I chose the simplest way – principled BSDF shader.

Approach to Geometry

The technique I love to use is defining the shape with low res geometry: I mark the edges that need to be sharp, drop the bevel modifier for these edges (it is super easy with the HardOps add-on), then drop the subsurface modifier. As a result, I get smooth geometry with beveled edges which I can easily manipulate.

Hair

I grow the hair with Blender’s ParticleSystem, then render it with a material for the normal map.

After that, I render it in the same frame for color variation.

For the hair card, I used the material below:

Posing

For posing the model I made a simple rig in Blender.

The Pose library allowed me to experiment with different poses, save and combine them together.

Lighting

Viktor Berendeev, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev