by Dan Baiton, CG artist

09  INITIAL BLOCK-OUT

Using Pedro's supplied imagery, I was able to set up image planes that represented the front and side views of our character within ZBrush.

A feature that's new to ZBrush 2021.6, 'Mesh Balloon', lets you quickly describe shapes by drawing a mask onto an object. I was able to pair this with our image planes to draw out the character's initial forms.

10  FINE-TUNING DETAILS

Once I was happy with the basic formation of the character, I enabled DynaMesh to add details – the shape of his face and the roundness of the ears. 

11 RETOPOLOGY

ZRemesher was used in conjunction with both ZRemesher guides and Polypaint. The guides were used to suggest an ideal topology flow and the 'red' Polypaint was used to entice the algorithm to focus on these areas. 

12  RETOPOLOGY FIXES

Once happy, it's time to jump into Maya for some finetweaking. The eyes, mouth and hands remained features of concern – and ultimately needed to be reworked using a topology rerouting process, for which Maya's Quad Draw tool was perfect. 

13 UVs

The UVs were created with the 'Auto UV Unwrap' tool, which can be acquired for free by downloading the Maya Bonus Tools from Autodesk. Auto UV Unwrap enables the user to suggest seam lines on the asset. Once completed, the tool unfolds the object and creates UV islands based on the suggested seams.

Once our character's new topology and UV have been completed, it was then time to move onto his clothing!

14  BASE FOR OUR SHIRT/SHORTS 

As we paid close attention to make workable geometry in our retopology stage, this allowed me to easily select all the faces needed to suggest our character's basic clothing shape. As I went around the model selecting all the faces I needed, I referred back to our concept design, checking I was adhering to Pedro's suggested clothing sizing. Once all the faces were selected, I duplicated these by going to Edit Mesh>Duplicate, which created a new geometry.