Behind the Scenes: Sylvester the Cat

Introduction

Hi, I’m Ümral Ismayilov from Azerbaijan, Baku. I am a 3D Lookdev artist, creating what always inspires me a lot, specializing in 3D character and motion design. It’s been about several years that I have been working as a freelancer on various game projects, trailer productions, character developments, NFT projects, etc. which have made me take serious and sophisticated steps in my career.

The main tools that I use often are Blender, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Adobe graphic and motion software if needed. I really love using the combination of these programs at work and in my spare time, which really persuades me to go more deeply into them and explore.

Inspiration

I think it is time to talk about my last project ‘Sylvester the Cat’ which is my favorite one!

As an art lover, I’m always in the search of new ideas and concepts that inspire me to create, share and make my day more productive. From my childhood, I enjoyed and admired the famous animated characters and always got curious how they were made so perfectly and beautifully. As I improved my creative skills, I decided to make a new concept-like remastering of my favorite characters from the deepest part of my mind, and turn them into detailed 3D illustrations. While surfing on Pinterest, I saw the old and well-known scene of Sylvester from Looney Tunes and decided to work on it. I tried to make the exact high-quality textures and details using my 3D software and Photoshop skills.

Sylvester

First of all, I started with the main character by modeling and posing it as in the reference. Considering that this scene was made with old-school 2D animation methods, it was hard to pose it with the rig in the same position. So, I tried deforming the mesh into the desired position.

After modeling the character in T-pose with clean mesh, I rigged it and brought it to the main pose in order to start working on more detailed parts. So, I exported the model in obj format and imported it into ZBrush to add main deformation details on it.

After several hours of sculpting using various brushes, I got Sylvester in a position similar to the reference and was satisfied with the look as a base mesh. Without losing time, I exported both high and low resolution models, and imported them into Blender again to work on texturing and grooming sections of the pipeline.

Before the grooming part, I decided to use Substance Painter for the simple texture of the model to set up the main color for its hair material.

After being satisfied with the texture of the base mesh, I started to work on the grooming which was the main part of this artwork to make it look more vivid and detailed.

I divided the hair particles into three parts as head, body, and hands to make it easier to work on separately.

After several hours of combing and playing with hair particles, I was satisfied with how it was positioned correctly and seamlessly.

Here, I have shared the shader that I used as material for the hair of Sylvester:

Objects

Here, you can see some of the used props that I modeled and texturized exactly according to the reference idea. These were modeled and UV wrapped in Blender, and textured in Substance Painter.

Scene

Coming to the scene setup, I used about 20 lighting sources containing spotlights and point lights. For the rest of my materials, I used good quality textures from Textures.com which is always the main source for me during the creating process.

Below is a screenshot from my viewport (hair particles turned off), ready to be rendered and worked on, with post-production in Adobe Photoshop.

Render and Post-Production

I used Cycles X render engine with 5000 samples, file size as 3000x3600 in raw render jpeg file, ready to be imported into Photoshop.

I used about 50+ layers in Photoshop to make it ready. I used various smoke layers from Envatoelements and added brightness, contrast, and color balance values to make it more beautiful.