DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-291
AUTHOR
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CLERIC This character has been remastered to look modern while still respecting the original intent
http://bit.ly/3Dworld-291
Arno Schmitz
Since my years as a student I have had a preference for the fantasy genre, so my early creations were in this style. The cleric was one of my first characters, and I decided that she deserved the same high-end game/cinematic treatment as my other recent works. Therefore, the goal of this project was to remaster this character, to enable her to stand side by side with my latest creations.
Arno Schmitz is the lead character artist at Guerrilla Games where he has worked on titles such as Horizon Forbidden West, Horizon Zero Dawn and Killzone Shadow Fall. www.artstation.com/Arno
Follow along the remaster journey of this character, in which I demonstrate the most relevant artistic and technical points for taking a creation of your own to the next level. If you decide to follow along but use a concept that is not your own, be sure to credit the original artist. The remastering process itself will be discussed in detail during this step-by-step guide, but all improvements made can be boiled down into two main camps: technical and artistic.
Regarding technical improvements, you need to consider factors such as porting all textures and materials to work with today’s workflows – such as physically based rendering, detail textures and layered shaders. You also need to allow yourself to use higher polygon counts for more detail fidelity.
DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-291
For the artistic improvements, we focus a lot on material expression. Make sure all the materials in the costume read like the intended material; this should already be obvious on a greyscale rendered sculpt. Texturing will enhance the material characteristics even further, bringing the surfaces closer to their real-world reference. In order to bring the costume of the old model to current quality standards, we will rework and update it using Marvelous Designer and ZBrush sculpting techniques. Besides material expression the face will get a lot of attention, too.
This asset is completely rebuilt using modern techniques while still respecting the spirit of the original design. The technical specifications for this character are a match to my previously made fantasy character. This will ensure the characters will work in harmony if they ever get used in the same scene. That means very clean and detailed game meshes that still use normal maps. Many 4K textures are used to texture the main elements of the character. XGen is chosen in favour of hair cards since this method looks more realistic and is consistent with the other work in my portfolio.
The renderer used for this endeavour was Arnold, which is Maya’s default renderer. Since I’ve also used it for other projects, I can reuse shaders and share assets quickly to keep my workflow efficient. Many offline rendering techniques, like raytracing, can be done in realtime engines now. So, a character like this would be perfect for a short movie made in Unreal or Unity, for example.
01
REMEMBER THE INTENT