KNB217: Digital Creatures By Emily Cosson (n11380811)

Mood Board

My aim for the creature mood board was to find reference images depicting a dark, mystical forest to shape a visual image of where the creature lives. I also took reference of flora and fauna that the creature would surround itself within including mushrooms, succulents, cacti and brightly coloured flowers.

Character Profile

Name: Gert (he/him)

Race: Forest Goblin

Appearance: Gert possesses a cute and innocent appearance, from his rounded and large face and body shape. His large, dark brown eyes, and large droopy ears enables Gert to see and hear effectively through the night. The forest goblin camouflages during the day from his great spikes sticking from the sides of his body and ears. With his head down, Gert can camouflage with the forest foliage as a mythical cacti from his large flower that splays across the top of his head.

Background: For over thousands years, the forest goblins have protected the mythical forests of Athea. However, Gert is one of the last goblins left to have survived the wild beasts of the forests. Gert is responsible for the harmony between creatures and undergrowth, spreading precious stones across Athea help balance and flourish the mythical forest.

Personality: Gert is extremely timid and cautious during the day, hiding from the beasts in his cacti disguise. After dusk, Gert was determined and cunning to spread the stones across the forest. Even though Gert appears innocent and quiet, the creature is incredibly brave and clever in his ability to adapt and camouflage himself within the magical cacti of the forest to avoid and hide from the wild beasts.

Creature Sketches

To depict the Gert's shy personality, I utilised shape language theory to give the creature a circular shaped head and body. Round shapes are known to evoke warmth or comfort and symbolises harmony and community within shape psychology (Shahbazi, 2024). In reference to the animal research, the character is drawn with large ears, the length of its head with its big, eyes taking up a large proportion of its face compared to other facial features. Spikes are featured along all the edges of the character including the ears, arms and sides of the body with a flower on the top of the creature's head to depict the camouflage of the creature being a cacti. Incorporating the comforting round shapes of the creatures naturally body contrasts with the discomfort of the sharp spikes added to the outside of Gert's body to emphasise the protective layer the character has to protect themselves from its preditors.

Modelling

To assist with the modelling process of the character Gert, the bone structure of the character was sketched with reference to the bone structure of Galagos. This aids the modelling of particular features of the character including the facial structure and joints in the arms and legs.

1 - Base Mesh

The base mesh of the character was sculpted in Zbrush using the 2D turn around sketch as reference for the creature. To build the base mesh, Zspheres were utilised as this was the best technique to form the round shape of the character.

This was the first time I had used Zbrush to model from scratch (previously using Maya), however I found that using the Zsphere technique was more intuitive of positioning and moving the spheres to build the base structure of the creature. This is because I had difficulty with ensuring I had proper topology in my Maya models previously, hence I would like to explore modelling and sculpting techniques to build characters and objects in Zbrush further in the future.

After refining the base model using Zspheres, the adaptive skin was previewed and I found that the top of the head had a large bulge (see left image). At first, I thought this was caused from adding the small sphere at the top to represent the middle of a flower. However, after experimenting with adjusting the scaling of the Zspheres, the original base sphere used for the head was causing the distortion at the top of the head. Hence, I significantly scaled the base sphere down which removed the distortion (see right image).

2 - Mesh Refinement

After adding the adaptive skin, the model was subdivided by 4 levels to achieve a higher poly base mesh of the creature. The mesh was then cleaned-up through smoothing the mesh around the face and body to connect the facial features and toes seamlessly with their respective body parts. The move tool was utilised to stretched the width of the body to achieve the roundness of the creature. A base was also created to ensure the posture of the character model was correct to minimise the illusion of the character leaning in a particular direction.

Additional features of the character were added including the spikes on the side of the body using the move tool. After subdividing and cleaning the mesh, I found that the fingers modelled with the Zspheres at merged. Therefore, I had to use the move and smoothing tool to recreate the gaps between the fingers. I learnt through this process how tedious and long the sculpting process can be to ensure all small details are correct within the model. I also learnt the importance of ensuring to mask out particular parts of the mesh I am working on to make sure I do not accidentally alter another part of the model.

To create the facial features of the character, the move and standard tool were used to sculpt the eye cavities, nose and nostrils and mouth cavity. Primitive sphere shapes were used and shaped to create the eyes and the upper and lower eyelids. To sculpt and position the eyes, nose and ears, I had taken reference from images of galagos to correct the position of the eyelids and details inside of the ears and the nostrils of the nose. After sculpting the facial features, the creature began to look more scary than cute which I had depicted in the character sketch (see left image). This was because I was not sculpting with the reference open in my Zbrush project as I found it difficult to sculpt in the background, so the image was open on my second monitor which I glanced at while sculpting. Therefore, I had referenced back to my 2D turn around image to adjust the facial features using the move tool to return the model to match the reference image (see right image). Hence, from this I learnt in future to ensure I keep the reference image open to model the creatures features directly rather than estimating.

I had experimented sculpting the flower petals into the creatures head in Zbrush as I wanted to give the effect that the flower had merged into the creature, an effect I did not think I could achieve in Maya. To sculpt the petals, I first used the clay build-up tool to create a rough shape for the petal (see left image). I then utilised the smoothing and standard tool to define the sides of the petal so the shape stood out against the base of the head (see right image). This technique was continued around the rest of the head to build up the flower on the creature.

High-Poly Gert Model in Zbrush

3 - Retopology

To retopologise the high-poly model to a low-poly model, I experimented using the Zremesher to reduce the polycount without loosing too much detail in the mesh. I reduced the polycount by 5 subdivisions, reducing the poly count from over 170,000 (see left image) to approximately 10,000 (see right image) without heavily reducing the quality of the features of the sculpted model.

The retopologised low-poly mesh was then exported from Zbrush to UV unwrap in Maya.

4 - UV Map

To UV unwrap my creature model, I firstly scaled the model from Zbrush to approximately 30 cm in height.

I created a seperate cube object to create the tongue for the creature. The nostril cavities also had to be altered in Maya by moving the faces and vertices of the inner nostrils back so it was clearer once all edges were smoothed.

To start the UV unwrapping process, I firstly seperated each majoy body part by cutting a seam to UV unwrap each part; head, hands, arms, body, legs and feet.

I attempted to create the cuts in hidden areas on the body so the seam was not as visible, for example, on the underside of the arm. However, this created a lot of distortion towards the wrist of the creature (see left arm in left image). Hence, I had to create the seam at the back of the arm to reduce visible stretching towards the wrist (see right arm in left image).

I decided to UV unwrap the hands from the arms seperately to make it less likely for distortion to occur with the fingers. I had followed this same step to complete the feet and legs. To reduce visible seams between the two parts of the hands/arms and the feet/legs, I experimented stitching the pieces together to determine whether this would minimise stretching occuring in the wrists and feet.

From stitching the seams together of the seperate UV maps, the stretching in the arms was no longer visible. The stretching at the front of the creatures feet was also no longer visible with now some visible stretching at the bottom of the feet where they join the body. This had been caused due to the way the creature was modelled where there is no distinct line seperating the legs from the body. Hence, when cutting the seam to seperate the two body parts, I had to cut the seam higher up the back of the body compared to the front, causing the slight distortion and stretching.

To further reduce the existence of visible seams seperating the arms and legs from the body, I experimented stitching these UV maps to the main body UV map. However in doing so, this created increased distortions and stretching within the arms and the feet towards the toes. Therefore, I decided not to stitch together the body pieces to the main body UV map.

The remaining body parts were unwrapped by placing a seam done the centre, back of the head and body to reduce any stretching. I found this process much simpler than I initially anticipated due to the complicated design of the spikes coming from the creatures body. However, from using the technique of seperating all of the body parts, I learnt I could easily unwrap the head and body by creating the singular seam down the back of the character. An issue I may have to resolve in future is ensuring I carefully texture the character so these seams are not obvious. Once I had unwrapped all UV maps, I scaled and positioned all maps to fit within one UV, scaling more important body parts larger so they possess greater detail during texturing; larger head and body compared to the tongue and eyeballs.

The final UV map has minimal stretching throughout the entire mesh. Some stretching is visible within the ears due to the size so in future I could have experimented seperating these pieces to reduce this distortion. Stretching is also visible from the toes, up the legs of the creature, this could be reduced in future by planning my model more accordingly to ensure I have a clear area to seperate the legs from body during the sculpting process.

Assignment 2 - 3D Character Production

Texturing

Before importing the mesh into Substance Painter for texturing, I delete history on all meshes, a step I missed before UV mapping. Once I had done this, I imported the mesh and established the base colours for Gert's textures. This was achieved using fill layers and the polygon fill tool to colour the entire body green and colour specific details of the mesh including the flower petals, eyes, finger nails, spikes and inner ears. To soften the transition of colour from the base green body, a blur filter was adding to all paint layers to blend the colours to make the textures appear more natural and apart of the mesh.

To add dimension to the character's skin, highlights were added to structured portions of the haracter including the eyebrow bones, cheeks, bridge of nose, arms and top of the feet (see the left most image). To further exaggerate the character's features, a darker paint layer was added beneath and above the eyes as well as on top of the arms to make the character appear more realisitc (see the middle image). The complementary colour of a dark purple was used against the green to contrast the base body colour and successfully achieve a shadow effect on the character's body. Again, a blur layer was added to blend these colours with the base texture (see the right most image).

To create a realistic flower texture on top of the character's head, I utilised reference images to decipher the paint layers I would need to create to achieve a 3-dimensional flower petal. I first outlined and painted a thick, dark pink down the centre of each petal and added a pale pink/white shade to shape the petal. After utilising the blur filter, a third layer was created to blend the middle of the flower to the paler pink to create a petal-like texture. To simulate the texture of the middle portion of flowers, I experimented using different texture materials until I found a circular pattern. This pattern could then be tiled and painted onto the top of the flower head.

To bring the character to life, I added additional texture materials to the body to resemble a plant-like texture. Similar to the flower head, I experimented tiling variations of clusters of dots to create the tongue texture for the character. This final step of adding texture materials ensured the character seemed life-like and not a flat model of colour.

Final Gert Texturing

By adding textured materials to the body layers, I had to connect a height map after importing the texture maps in Maya. Due to the nodes not including a height map channel, I had to do some experimentation and research into how I could successfully connect these height maps to reflect the correct textures created in Substance Painter. Through research, I found that an additional node, a displacement shader, had to be created and connected to generate the height maps onto the mesh in Maya. The map had to be connected to the displacement shader as it would allow the modification of vertices of the mesh on a greyscale without disrupting the mesh's geometry (Academic Phoenix Plus, 2022).

Learning height map connection in Maya

Blend Shapes

Developing blend shapes was difficult as I had not consider the shape used to model the face and dimensions of the character's face, as blend shapes was not yet a process I had gone through in my previous modelling projects. Therefore, a hurdle I had to overcome was manipulating the eyelids to seem shut or in a squint position. When modelling the eyelids, they were not cut perfectly to semi-circle so the eyelids could not be simply rotatated to appear shut. So, I had to use a longer approach of moving each vertices individually to create the effect of the eyes squinted or shut. This outcome was not as clean as I would have liked as the eyelids had to extend further out in order to fully cover the eyes so they did not protrude through the mesh.

For my next project, I will ensure to keep in mind the ways in which the face is constructed to ensure blend shapes can be constructed quickly and cleanly for final animations. Since the character was model with its mouth open, a closed-mouth blend shape was created and selected as the last model so this would turn into the base mesh for the character.

Rigging

For the rigging process, the Human IK skeleton had to be utilised which made the process extremely difficult as my character does not inherit correct proportions to humans. The first problem I faced was major distortion in the legs and lower half of the body after skinning the mesh to the rig. After experimenting with the character's rig, I found that it was a problem due to where I had placed the joints on the mesh. I had initially placed the joints in a curve for the spine and the feet/ankle joints further forward; more resembling the joint placement of humans. From this, Maya automatically positioned the joints where it thought it should be correctly placed after skinning causing the distortion. By adjusting the position of the joints by raising the height of the hip joints and adjusting the feet joints further back, the distortion after skinning was no longer visible.

I also wanted to experiment rigging the ear of the character as this was a process I had not yet done before. I created 4 additional joints off the main head joint to control the paint portions of the ear. Originally, I had placed the joints along the outer portion of the ear, but after doing more research on rigging animals, I discovered the most effective placement of joints for ears was done the centre, inner side of the ear. This would ensure the middle section of the ear attached to the ear would be the first point of movement which follow the structure of the ear to the bottom point.

Video reference for rigging animal ears

Skin Weights

After discovering the potential differences my rigged character mesh had against a humanoid character, I began considering how this would effect posing and skin weights. Due to the nature of my character, their would be limited mobility to pose the character from the addition of the spikes on its body. Hence, when skin painting, I was not able to correct all deformations caused from extreme rotating or posing portions of the body or body parts since the character would not be able to perform these in the first place. Some considerations while painting skin weights include:

• The character's round body shape means it has limited mobility in its arms and legs as the body parts will hit the sides of the body or head
• The character cannot bend forward or back as it would interfere with the spikes
• Spikes also interfere with the character's head movement

Therefore, I focused my efforts to paint skin weights on the crucial body movements the character could perform including slights movements in the feet/legs, arms and head. The main skin weight problems were the unbalanced weight on the body parts due to the character not possessing character anatomy including seperation of the leg and body, prominent knee caps and elbows. As a consequence, skin weights had to be adjusted for all joints within these body parts to ensure stretching or deformations of the mesh were minimised.

Creating a non-humanoid character means that more time and care must be taken into considering the bone and joint structure of the charater. Initially, I had made the concept art of the character before I made the sketch of the skeleton as this was a second thought of mine and so this was not properly considered during the modelling and rigging process. In future, I would like to do more research and experimentation with different proportioned, mythcial characters, to expand my knowledge on correcting bone bone structure and the placement of joints to ensure the rigging and skin weight process is less tedious and difficult.

Render Testing

For my final render of my character, I wanted to capture the mystical and enthusiastic personality of Gert in harmonising balance in the mythical forest which he lives within. The pose I aimed to portray is Gert reaching up in passion and power to help the forest grow and prosper, similar to a superhero stance/pose. Therefore, I wanted to ensure the angle of the render encapsulated this feeling of hope and power. I first experimented with lower angles to create the illusion of the audience being able to look up to the character. However, I realised that this made the character seem quite large when in fact Gert was a small creature. I also felt the angle was off as the audience could not properly see what direction or where the character's eye were pointing towards.