About

My name is Adrien Rouquié, I’m a CG artist and illustrator from Avignon, in the south of France.

I studied in Estienne School in Paris and Mopa (Supinfocom) in Arles, both for CG animation.

I’m the co-author of the short film Outdoors, broadcast by Canal+. I work freelance at animation studios such as Tu Nous Za Pas Vus studio and Passion Pictures.

I started to use Blender at the end of my studies. This is, for me, the perfect software for visual development. It allows me to create proposals quickly and maintain a professional quality.

 

This article is made possible by Qarnot Computing

Qarnot provides green cloud computing services.The heat released by the servers during operation is reused to sustainably warm buildings.
Learn more on qarnot.com.

Inspiration

I was inspired by a concept created by one of my favorite artists, Blad Moran.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Blad Moran🇺🇦 (@bladmoran)

The design is very expressive, we immediately perceive the personality of the character. In addition, the quality of the drawing allows me to be able to study the volumes that compose the anatomy of the character.

Workflow

With this project, I aimed to advance my knowledge and experiment with new techniques. Each element of the model is, in reality, at several stages of advancement. The model could be "production-ready", but my goal was to produce an image as quickly as possible. And this is a 100% Blender project!

Before launching into this model, I first practiced on a simpler design :

Design inspired by heddarsketch

I wanted to push the blocking to the maximum. It gives more control and makes the construction more fun. This is the stage when we take care of all the components of the design, proportions, shapes, silhouette, etc.

To build the blocking, I start from very simple meshes, like a subdivided cube.

Then I use the Elastic Deform brush in sculpt mode. Usually the face can be broken down into fewer shapes but I wanted to experiment.

The goal is to break down the shapes in order to make it easier to nest them one inside the other. Sometimes I merged a group of shapes between them, using the Blender voxel remesher and the Exoside’s Quad Remesher plugin.

I used the RetopoFlow plugin for the retopology of the head. I like this tool a lot, it’s a very nice tool.

For the hand, blocking was the easiest technique to get a good design quickly.

I then posed the hand, remeshed it with a voxel and directly sculpted some detail on it.

For the texturing and shading, I wanted to keep it simple—I just used procedural textures in Principled BSDF shaders. I rendered the image in real-time using the Eevee engine. For my use, it's ideal; the rendering quality allows me to highlight my work very quickly and in a very large format.

Here is an overview of the final setup and lighting.

Final image

Conclusion

Each style needs to find its own workflow. For more or less cartoon designs it is very interesting to keep simple shapes at a blocking stage as long as possible. I want to continue to train on the same kind of exercise to find the best practices and get faster. Then my goal will be to do it on my own designs.

I had a lot of fun creating it! I hope all this article has been helpful. Thank you BlenderNation for allowing me to share my work.

Do not hesitate to ask me questions in the comments!

About the Author

Adrien Rouquié, freelance CG generalist and illustrator.