The Oni: Working on a Japanese Character in Maya & ZBrush

Introduction

Hi, my name is Pom, I'm from Thailand. Right now, I'm studying full-time at Gnomon in the 2-year program. In 2019, I graduated from Silpakorn University in Thailand and decided to move to LA to pursue my dream as a 3D artist. I've had past experience of working as a freelancer in animation and 3D printing fields for such products as toys, likeness sculpts, and life-size helmets. 

I've had a background in Manga drawing, so characters have been one of the main interests for me for a really long time. I also think making characters is a really good way for me to express myself as an artist. I've been doing characters in 3D since late 2011. The first 3D software that I picked up was ZBrush and I just fell in love with the medium ever since.

The Oni Project: Start

This project was done as my final task for the Texturing and Shading 2 class at Gnomon taught by Christophe Desse, an artist at Naughty Dog.

Prior to that, I already worked on another Japanese ghost "The Spirit" which is also my own take on a killer from the game Dead by Daylight. I decided to work on the Oni next to finish them both as a set of killers from the same universe, plus I'm also very passionate about Japanese art and culture which makes this project very enjoyable for me.

As for reference, I looked up the concept art for the game (Dead by Daylight) as well as real-world references of the actual samurai armor to understand how the pieces fit together.

Before I begin to work on any project, I make sure to have a picture in mind of how I want it to look like in the end. The main things that I plan beforehand are the presentation aspects of the character such as the pose, the camera angle, mood, and tone. Then, it is a matter of trying to mimic the image in my mind as close as I can.

Sculpting & Modeling

For sculpting, I used a male base mesh I already made beforehand to help speed up the blocking process. Most of the armor parts are meshes that were extracted from that initial base mesh. Later, I Dynamesh and sculpt on them until I think the forms are good. Then, I use ZRemesher to clean up the topology.

Clay build up, Dam standard, and Move brushes are my three main brushes for most of the projects. In this project, however, I also used a custom twisted rope brush from Badking to help create bigger ropes around Oni's armor and neck. I like to use the mask brush to do the engravings which are present on the chest armor pieces and the sword's gold pieces. The shoulder piece, for example, was an extracted mesh with 4 cylinders (for the fangs and the horns) sculpted separately for symmetry. Once I'm happy with the forms I use the mirror and weld option and then I can add more details on the mesh.

As for the hair, I used XGen for Maya. Basically, I made a mesh that resembles a scalp, then placed guides in the direction I wanted the hair to follow. I used some modifiers like clumping and noise which I think are very important for creating believable hair and keeping it from looking "too perfect".

UVs

Since this project was only meant for presentation, I didn't have to worry too much about making sure it was ready for animating or rigging. I use a combination of ZBrush's UV Unwrap tool and manually cutting the UVs in Maya. In some of the main parts such as the mask or the gold pieces of the armor, I did the UVs in Maya to make sure that they looked as good as possible. For some of the smaller pieces such as the rope connecting the armor pieces or the leather straps, I use Unwrap UV in ZBrush with control painting to save time. If something doesn't turn out the way I want it I can always fix it manually in Maya.

Texturing

Christophe encourages students to create their own smart material, so in this project, I made most of the materials from Fill layers, generators, black and white masks, hand-painting, etc.

For instance, the mask is a combination of a red fill layer with some grunge and dirt texture. I also used a seamless wood normal map that was created inside Photoshop to add some subtle wood details on it. The gold parts on the mask use another fill layer with different metallic and roughness settings filled with a black mask; I hand-painted the areas I want to be gold with white color.

To save time, I created my own "worn gold" smart material which I use on every gold part on the model - it is a combination of curvature-based masks, grunge, dirt, subtle flakes normal map texture, and fill colors. The idea here is to keep everything as non-destructive as possible so that I can go in and tweak anything within the smart material to my liking.

The patterns on the clothes and pants were a little bit more tricky to create. I drew the pattern in black and white in Photoshop and by using the pattern as a mask on a fill layer (gold color) I can create a shape of that pattern. Tri-planar projection is what I used on that fill layer to make the pattern repeat itself around the mesh. The same idea goes with the cloth hanging from the shoulder pads but the pattern has to be drawn seamlessly in Photoshop beforehand.

Presentation

The final shot was set up with standard 3-point lighting in Redshift with an additional top light because I wanted the rim lights to be a bit brighter to separate the character from the black background. This stage involved a lot of trial and error and it is also a matter of the taste. I tried lights with colors such as blue or green since those colors are often seen in horror movies but eventually I decided to go with the standard white color. The character also has a very strong red glow on his mask and armor pieces - instead of just painting the glow in Photoshop I added invisible red lights around the parts so that once I painted the glow it would look like the light is reflecting off of nearby surfaces believably.

The nice thing about Redshift for Maya is that I can do a little bit of post-process while the image is rendering. I added LUTs as well as a bloom effect to make the final image a little bit more interesting. In the post-production part in Photoshop, I use mainly 3 render passes from Redshift: Beauty, AO, and Alpha. I'll use the beauty pass as my main layer with the alpha map as a mask and then add an AO pass as multiply on top of the layer to create some shadows around the enclosed areas. I like to use adjustments such as levels and color correction to help create a nice contrast on the character as well as color grade it. For the final touches, I added a chromatic aberration in Photoshop from a duplicate of a beauty pass layer and painted the glowing parts with red/orange brushes with blending options like color dodge. I also painted in some of the fixes for the hair with colors similar to the rendered image.

Sasawat Intakul, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev