Modeling a Pear Monster Using Blender, ZBrush & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

My name is Sadra Shariaty, and I am a self-taught 3D character artist from Iran. Two years ago, I made the decision to switch my professional career from being a medical practitioner in Orthoses and Prostheses to pursuing a career in 3D art. Prior to that, I had been learning 3D as a hobby, but I had always been curious about what it would be like to be a creator. I was able to utilize the knowledge I had gained from my medical school education in my 3D art, and thanks to technology and the internet, I was able to learn how to create appealing 3D artwork and characters from the comfort of my own home.

The Disgruntled Pear Project

I often browse ArtStation to admire other artists' work and find inspiration for my own character sculpts. It was last year when I stumbled upon Justin Gerard's artwork titled "The Disgruntled Pear," and I was immediately captivated by the concept. Ever since I purchased Nomad Sculpt on my iPad two years ago, I have made it a habit to do quick sculpts whenever I have some spare time. I would import a concept I liked into Nomad Sculpt and spend an hour or two creating a basic sculpt before moving on. Last year, I quickly sculpted the disgruntled pear on my iPad and saved it but I had forgotten about it until about a month ago when I came across the blockout I had made of the character.

After rediscovering The Disgruntled Pear, I decided to take it to the next level and turn it into a full project. I transferred the character to Blender and ZBrush to refine it further. I used frog references to help me create the skin texture and shape of the character, and I also used references of carpenter bees to design the bee in the concept.

Sculpting

To begin with, I used Nomad Sculpt to create a rough blockout of the character about a year ago. Then, about 1-2 months ago, I imported the character into Blender to complete the blockout process. I prefer to do the blockout in Blender as it provides more precise camera and lighting controls than ZBrush, which allows me to better match the shapes to the concept. Once the blockout was complete in Blender, I transferred the character to ZBrush using an addon called GOB.

In ZBrush, I posed the character using Transpose Master and made any necessary adjustments to the parts that needed to be changed to fit the pose. For the skin details, I used a ZBrush plugin called "XMD toolbox" for the first time. This plugin offers a wide range of alphas and brushes, which made detailing the character much easier. Additionally, it allowed me to manage my own alphas in one software, eliminating the need to switch between alphas or go through Lightbox to select a specific one.

To create the stick, I simply shaped a cylinder to fit the concept and created the holes using the Clay brush with a higher intensity. As for the worms, I used basic modeling techniques by creating a torus and duplicating it around before dynameshing everything together.

The most challenging aspect of modeling and sculpting the character was getting the proportions and shapes right, which required the most time and effort. 

To create the damage in the holes, I used ZBrush's new feature called Slime Bridge.

Retopology & Unwrapping

The workflow used for unwrapping and preparing the character for texturing was inspired by Mark Plouffe which I also used for the first time in my previous project, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. The goal was to minimize the time spent on manual retopology and unwrapping and jump straight into PBR texturing. The process involved decimating all parts of the character to a level where details are kept, resulting in a final high poly with 6 million vertices. The parts were then exported as an FBX file from ZBrush and imported into Blender.

The Blender add-on "Batch Rename" was used to quickly rename all the objects with the necessary suffix for the baking process, which in this case was "_high". This eliminates the manual renaming of objects and saves some time. The high poly collection was then disabled in Blender, and the character was decimated further in ZBrush, resulting in a low poly model with 1.1 million vertices. Because I used the decimated high poly mesh in this phase, I did not have to do the “pre_process” part of decimating in ZBrush again which saved some time. This low poly model was used for baking in Substance 3D Painter. The entire process of preparing the mesh and baking took about an hour to an hour and a half, and the workflow is expected to become even faster in my future projects.

The so-called “low poly” has a topology like in the picture below, but it can even go lower. For my computer this amount is fine and it can handle it so I didn’t experiment by lowering the polys as I wanted to make this process as quick as I can. 

Now I would import the low poly to RizomUV where I would do automated UV. These are the options I used for auto UV and packing inside RizomUV:

Now I add some UDIMs and click on UV and Pack. Then I get something like this:

You can notice that I have multiple islands and seams which are packed into 6 UDIMs. Honestly, I could have used fewer, but it works fine for baking and texturing the character in Substance 3D Painter. Although the number of seams may seem daunting, it won't be an issue for the texturing process since we’re using Substance 3D Painter. After importing the low poly model with UV into Blender, I verify the texel density by applying a checker map to the character.

Once I have confirmed the texel density, I utilize the Batch Rename add-on to rename the low poly models, similar to the process used for renaming the high poly models. The final step before exporting to Substance 3D Painter involves scaling both the high and low poly models to the height of a basic Cube in Blender, which measures 2 meters in height and is representative of the typical scale for the character. This ensures that the character has a real-life scale and is suitable for Substance 3D Painter without requiring extensive adjustments. By doing so, I can minimize the time spent adjusting the options in Substance 3D Painter and achieve a high-quality bake result on my first attempt. For this character, I achieved excellent results without any need to adjust the bake settings.

Texturing

Once I exported the low poly and high poly as OBJ files from Blender, I imported them into Substance 3D Painter and enabled the UDIM workflow option. To ensure everything was functioning correctly and to detect any errors, I performed a test bake of the normal map at a 512 resolution. Following this, I proceeded to bake all maps, including normal, ambient occlusion, and thickness, at a 4K resolution, which was a speedy process. I then commenced the texturing phase, beginning with the pear, which was the most significant component of the texturing process. My approach was to texture the pear similarly to human skin. Here's how I organized the layer groups for the pear:

To begin the texturing process, I first added some red, pink, and yellow fill layers using maps such as ambient occlusion as a base for the subdermal part.

Then I made a base skin with green and white fill layers.

Next, I utilized the Dirt and Smooth Noisy brushes to manually paint and achieve a natural transition between the colors.

Next, I utilized a fill layer and utilized the Curvature map as a mask to enhance the details.

After being satisfied with the Subdermal and Epidermal layers, I proceeded to add fine details by manually painting and using smart masks. The end result was the final Base color of the pear.

Then, I fine-tuned roughness and went back and forth between Substance 3D Painter and Blender's Cycles render engine to achieve a better representation of the details.

I applied the same process and technique to the rest of the character, including the leaves and the bee. Here's the final base color for all the meshes:

In the end, I exported all the textures in 2k as I find it so fast to export and use in the rendering software. 

Bee

To quickly create the bee, I referred to my references for its shape. My main goal was to make it look realistic as it was supposed to be a companion to the pear. I followed the same texturing method as I did for the pear and used my references to guide me. I paid attention to adding variation throughout the bee, including the eyes. For the wings, I added some emission to the blue parts and used the dots brush to make those parts glow.

I used surface noise in ZBrush to create the eyes by adding a honeycomb texture that I found online. This gave the eyes a more realistic look, and I used the same technique to texture them as I did for the rest of the character to make more variation.

I utilized Blender's new hair system to create hair for the bee. First, I created an Empty hair and used it to generate hair strands around the bee. I then used various brushes to comb and edit the hair. Finally, I utilized Geometry Nodes to control the thickness, length, noise, and overall amount of hair. This allowed me to efficiently create satisfactory hair for the bee.

Rendering

I used Blender's Cycles for the rendering process. I found it very convenient to use as it allowed me to easily handle the lighting and prepare the scene. Additionally, I utilized the Node Wrangler add-on, which enabled me to import all the UDIMs into Blender quickly with just one click. Furthermore, I made use of the "Reload Images" option in this add-on to swiftly update the textures after exporting from Substance 3D Painter, making it easy to do look development between the two programs. Despite a large number of UDIM textures, I was impressed by the speed of Cycles during the look development phase.

During the rendering process, I tried experimenting with some procedural nodes such as a skin shader, but I wasn't satisfied with the test renders. Eventually, I decided to stick with the PBR textures for the character. To add subsurface scattering color, I used a Hue Saturation node between the base color and the input.

To streamline the look dev process and gain a better understanding of the final render, I began lighting the character before diving into the texturing phase. Initially, I added 3 point lighting but ultimately settled on 2 key lights and 2 fill lights with varying intensity values, as well as five rim lights.

During the process of texturing and look development, I incorporated some clarity lights with a low intensity to illuminate specific areas that required more clarity. It is important to note that the intensity of these lights was deliberately kept low to ensure that the impact on the lighting was subtle and only served to enhance the clarity of certain parts of the character.

After that, I used an HDR with low intensity to add some subtle realistic lighting to the whole scene. You can use the setup below for HDR to make the background in one color. This helped me achieve the desired color and avoid any potential reflections or color interference from the HDR.

I avoid using the contrast option in Blender and instead bring the final render with low contrast to Photoshop for compositing. This allows me to have more control over the contrast, lighting, and shadows in order to further enhance the artwork. The difference between the original render and the final result can be seen below:

Conclusion

In order to track the time I spend on my projects, I have recently started using the Clockify app on my Windows computer. This has been helpful in allowing me to understand which phase of the project has taken the most time and identify areas where I need more practice. In total, I spent approximately 70 hours on this character. Automating the retopo, UV, and packing process saved a significant amount of time.

There are many resources available online to help improve one's skills in 3D art. Watching tutorials on YouTube, viewing artwork on ArtStation, and reading articles on websites like 80 Level have all contributed to my growth as an artist. However, I still have a long way to go in my journey. 

I trust that everyone will find this article informative and beneficial.

Sadra Shariaty, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie