Claudia Luehl
Character Artist
The Goddess
This piece was done for my Demo Reel class at Gnomon School of Visual Effects, the goal was to create a demo reel piece within 10 weeks. It was quite a challenge, as I dared to get out of my comfort zone of real-time characters and do a more cinematic one with UDIMs and XGen grooming. I learned A TON during this project!
Big thanks to my instructors Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma for all their support and feedback on the way.
Based on the beautiful artwork "Diana" by Peter Polach.
I had the opportunity to write a breakdown of my project "the Goddess" for 80 Level. It was pretty fun.
Check out their article
Project Breakdown
Modeling
Since I was trying to align the piece to the concept I had to create a camera and used an image plane . I blocked out the objects to get a feeling for the scale and space and adjusted the perspective and focal length so it aligns with the concept.
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After that I started sculpting one piece after another, using the blocked out shapes as scale reference and then adding each finished piece to the scene. With some of the sculls I was able to reuse one base skull with already done UVs and just stretch certain parts and adding more surface details, what was a huge time saver.
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Texturing
I split the heads UVs over 6 UDIMs, each 4K, and with a symmetrical Layout.
For texturing I used high resolution face scans from TexturingXYZ maps, as they offer incredible displacement maps with secondary, tertiary and micro surface details.
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For the Albedo Maps I use the XYZ Textures as a base, but I had to adjust them since the character is very pale. After that I added a ton of colors to create details and skin variations.
I mostly used these 3 alphas when paining the masks as they feel much more organic than a soft round brush.
Exept for the body I textured most of the objects in Substance Painter 6.
In this updated version of Substance Painter it was now possible to bake and export selected UDIM tiles.
That's why instead of packing all objects of the same material into one big texture tile, I separated them into smaller UDIMS.
This way I had much more flexibility as I was now able to bake and export separate small textures, which is way much faster than one big one.
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In this project I used a lot of displacement Maps for repetitive ornaments and details, like for the fabrics borders with the golden stitching or the engraved ornaments of the hunting horn.