Two Heavens As One

“Niten Ichi-ryū” Character Design by Pavel Hristov. Go check him out on his Artstation page.

This character spoke to me as a 3D artist due to the many different kinds of materials all juxtaposed together. And it was a good opportunity to practice making hair cards which is something i’ve been working on the past few months off and on. You can see my hair studies here on Artstation.

Software: Zbrush, Blender, Substance Painter

Blender Addons: Auto Rig Pro, Hair Tool, Animation Layers

Blender Cycles Render

realtime renders

See the model animated and in 3D!

Lit, flat color, surface normals, wireframe. The model is a little under 70k triangles. Half of that is the hair and fur.

To begin a project, I like to study and break down all the components. In some cases I can decide what should be if parts are not fully shown or covered up.

I begin with one of the base-mesh that comes with zbrush since this character is mainly about the clothing and hair.

I adjust the proportions of the head and legs before going too far in details, comparing a screenshot to the concept drawing.

Before and after making love to zbrush.

All glory to the zipper curve brush!

Some hard surface sculpting on the legs.

I used the transpose cloth brushes to help make wrinkles on the jacket.

All high-poly meshes, poly-grouped for ID masks and ready for baking.

Retopology of the body.

Generating fur using Hair Tool addon, and using substance painter to bake the HD fur down to a texture base under the cards.

Hair cards made using Hair Tool addon for blender. I combine curled and flat cards for efficient coverage.

UV unwrap

baking and texturing the body

All the parts coming together to be rigged.

Rigging using Auto-Rig-Pro addon and adding many custom bones for props, hair, draping parts of the outfit. Also animating with layers addon. Wild that anim layers are not in base blender (yet?)

When making the sword I wanted to actually model the wrap and so I came up with this method to make the braided fabric instead of just painting diamonds down the grip.

Thanks for viewing this project!