Project G1 Fanart

[Hayley Sweigard]

Copyrightsfor Drakengard 3 and NieR: Automata both belong to Square Enix, and the original concept for Zero was created by artist Kimihiko Fujisaka. Anything related to the games and the concept of Zero belongs to the original creators!

As a character artist in my final year of university, I've spent the last year refining my portfolio to get it to a higher standard. For my final year project, I wanted to create a model based around one of my passions that would help me refine my skills. What I eventually settled on was a project based around the Drakengard/NieR series, with the plan being to make a Drakengard character in a style influenced by NieR: Automata. This was influenced by the visual upgrades made for the remaster of the original NIER, NieR Replicant 1.22..., as visual changes were made that made it more visually consistent with Automata's art style.

I gathered a lot of research in the early stages of the project, including (but not limited to) character references, art style references, material breakdowns and workflow research (of course, only a small amount of these could be included here)

The high poly sculpt of the model was created in Zbrush, with the clothing being mostly created in Marvelous Designer and hard surface elements being created using Zbrush and 3ds Max. I ended up closely referencing to 2B's model to start with and then diverging from this to create a character that looked more like Zero, adjusting the face to get her features to show through.

Retopology was completed in Maya, with unwrapping being done in 3ds Max. The original plan was to complete all of this step in 3ds Max (as it is the software I used to use for this step) but after doing more research into Maya's tools, I ended up finding them much more efficient for the process. The final model (including hair cards, which were added later on) came to just under 67k polygons. My self imposed limit for this project was 70k based on my own research into Automata's models, so I was luckily able to keep within this limit.

Texturing was done in Substance Painter, with the model being baked in this software too. To get the face to look more Automata like, I ended up painting "makeup" onto the face. This seems to be an essential part of the Automata faces based on the original models, and was a big contributing factor to the final models fitting the art style.

The real time groom was created using the method described in Maria Puchkova's FlippedNormals groom tutorial, which involves creating the hair cards using Xgen in Maya, baking them down using the Arnold Renderer and placing them using a tool like GS Curvetools to import into engine. As this was my first time creating a full groom using these tools, I took the chance to experiment with them and tried to replicate the "chunky" hair look a lot of the Automata models seem to have.

The final renders were completed in Unreal Engine 5, with the model being rigged and posed. I wanted to show off how my model looks in a real time setting, and so created a Niagara particle system for video renders too.

For her colors, I could see something a bit fierier, with less pinks and hotter orange. Maybe something more along this line?

annieprojectcolor.png1208684 224 KB

Maybe adding some darker elements could fit since she is the Dark Child. I could actually see her using a dark purple scheme for it, like her goth skin.

I have been working on this project for a little over a month in my spare time. I have always loved HOPE and it is my all time favorite legendary in game. This is my take on what it might look like in real life. I hope you all like it:

I used Maya For the primary work, HDR Light Studio for the Environment lighting/reflections, and Redshift for lighting/Shading/Rendering. I also used Nuke for just a little bit of grain and would normally use it to comp all of the passes together, but RedShift did such a good job on the beauty pass, I just took it as is lol.

Rick and Morty Garage scene in UE 4.25. Baked Lighting using GPU Lightmass. This is a personal project I worked on some years ago, but didn't get around to finish it up until recently. I thought it would be fun to try and imagine how Rick's garage...

Character modeling has always been my passion so I needed to learn something more professional, see how everything works in the environment production and how great studios work in that area. Peter Zoppi is a great instructor and he prepared me for what I needed such as building characters for an efficient deformation, UV mapping and its nuances, texturing, practical rigging for character presentation and others. It was simply sensational.

From the beginning, I wanted to do an appealing character. I started to do researches where I found the Pharah interpretation by the amazing artist Yi Sui and it was love at first sight. Her look caught my attention. I built a simple reference table (RefTable) as shown in the picture below.

In this work, I used a base mesh to gain time and only made the needed adjustments. The concept itself has already nice facial features so I only needed to put my touches based on a mix of other references. In the end, I always make a ZBrush render to see what I need to fix to improve and to finish my block out step.

As you can see hair takes time, so references and patience are the key elements here. Generally, I take a few days to finish hair and the results worth the time. Just remember, everything begins with good planning and collecting some references.

In 2018, before I took the course with Peter Zoppi, I finished another class at CGMA, Texturing for Film/Cinematics with Chris Nichols where I learned amazing techniques for texturing. So, when I came to the character course, I had a good background in this area and Peter only pushed up my skill.

My skin textures are made in Mari. In general, my first channel is the fine displacement because with it I can generate maps like cavity, specular, and use it as a channel mask for the albedo texture. I make simple projections for that and do some render tests to find possible problems and fix them.

When I am ok with the fine displacement, I go to my albedo maps using the same approach: projections and render tests. In this case, I did a mix of a simple color map done in ZBrush and my base projection in Mari to see how everything is going.

This is the part of the project where you need a little bit of patience and observation. After some feedback, I saw that there was a certain need to bring the model a little closer to the original character of the game without losing the features of the concept. So, again, I collected more references for the original Pharah to compare some of the features and obtain the following result.

Marvelous Designer was a big help as always. The workflow is well known: first, we get the mesh in Marvelous, export it to ZBrush or Maya for retopology and transfer the attributes into Maya. The main trick here was in UVs thinking. Keep in mind the directions of the UV. This turns your life easier when handling the textures.

Generally, all my render tests are made with low quality. This way I can improve some settings to see better what is happening with samples and antialiasing. Most of my shaders are layered and this is really helpful. Some lobes like specular and glossiness can be controlled with more freedom. Of course, good maps like showed above in the skin part help a lot, too. There is no secret in Renderman. Everything is well documented.

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