How to model a character for animation

Artist Jean-Michel Bihorel shared the character design of Georges Henri de la Poudrière with fellow artist Camille Campion. It is a great free plugin for maya in order to speed up tremendously the time required to do a rig. I use Advance Skeleton for that. You can do it in zbrush or benefit from the new modeling tools in maya. 09. It is a litle puzzle game in order to have a good flow of edge loops. I often us cavity maps from ZBrush to add a bit of extra detail in my hand painted textures. Start with concept sketches
As my character is designed to be animated later, the process is very classic. Yeti is very good for that kind of process as you can combine all the patches in the same node tree at the end. Combing hair
Combing the hair was a quite time consuming process. 05. Using shaders
For the shaders, I tweak all the assets in a neutral environment with the same HDR for all the props in order to be able to combine them at the end and having them react all the same way to the light. «It provided me with a base to start modelling in ZBrush while staying very close from the original. I define a small area, comb it precisely then jump to the next one utils I have the full hair-style. Here is the drawing from Camille Campion we finally settled on after many versions. So I switched back to one uv patch at the end. [The result] still requires quite a lot of cleaning and detailing to be usable for rendering.»
01. ZBrush concept
I started the model in ZBrush in order to move freely without the need for a topology. 08. The project took a year to create as Jean-Michel modelled the entire figure for animation as well as paying attention to the finer details. I comb one patch at the time in order to have more control. You could use 3dCoat or topogun as well. First I wanted to have a lot of details so I used 3 UV patches for the head with each 8k maps. 06. The concept was devised on paper by Camille and then Jean-Michel realised it in 3D, from modelling to compositing. Even the hair is having the same light setup which didn’t always used to be the case with other rendering engines. Whereas in Zbrush it move fast and it is easier to stay objective on your own work. It is great as I can make iterations very fast in order to find the best match for the drawing in 3d. I pose the character, touch up the pose for some of the elements in ZBrush then the scene is ready for the final lighting and rendering! Painting textures
I usually start to paint my textures once all these steps are achieved. Lighting process in Arnold is very straight forward as everything reacts in a very physic way to the lights. The UV stage
After the retopology has been finished, you have to open proper uvs. Then I use the same layer in a different way to output my specular maps and other utility maps. 02. 03. I soon realised it was too much and that it was slowing me down, not much for the rendering but more for the iterations I was able to do while painting, exporting both my textures and displacement maps in three steps was taking far too much time.