INTRODUCTION
Hi, my name is Roger Renno, and I am from Brazil. I have a degree in 3D animation and modeling, and have been working in 3D production for about 6 years. I have contributed to children's animated series currently airing on HBO Max and Cartoon Network, as well as games and animations for advertisements.
INSPIRATION
I am a huge fan of Nintendo games, and Zelda is my all-time favorite. Link, the iconic and charismatic protagonist, is widely recognized by everyone. When I came across an illustration of Link by artist Samuel Soarez, I was truly inspired. It motivated me to create a 3D model with enhanced realistic details and lighting. I believe that using high-resolution textures for this project added greater depth and complexity, while also allowing me to explore procedural textures in more depth.
PROCESS
Modeling
I used Blender for modeling the blockout of the character and details like body, eyeballs, shield, sword, and bag. When I finished blocking, I exported more polygons to an FBX file to import in ZBrush to refine details, mainly of the body and the clothes. In ZBrush, I made the sewing detailed with lines, cloth folds, some parts of the skin, nails, and details of ears.
Material
Next, I exported the low poly of the model created in Blender. With the high poly model finished, I exported it to make bakes and finished the paints and textures on Substance Painter with 8K of resolution in image textures. I painted some details of clothes and sewing with some brushes of Substance Painter and created textures in better resolution.
After that, I returned to Blender and made a PBR shader set for each material in the assets. For the clothes, I made a material with a mix of procedural textures to make it more realistic. For the skin, I made a shader with subsurface scattering and added some noise in bumps to make more details. For the eyes, I used some procedural shaders with an image of realistic eyes to give them more shine.
Particles
For the eyelashes, cloth fibre, and face, I used particles of Blender modifiers because this was lighter for CPU. For the hair and eyebrows, I used Maya Xgen and exported to Alembic because I think Blender is so limited with hair core options, and it worked out.
Rendering
Finally, I rendered the scene using Cycles and employed a plugin called Cam-FX to create realistic focus and camera effects. This add-on provided additional options and improved the overall quality of the still scenes.
RENDER: Link Fanart from Zelda
Thank you for reading!
About the Artist
Roger Renno is a freelance 3D generalist in São Paulo, Brazil, working with major game producers like Xbox, League of Legends, and Freefire. He also teaches computer graphics at a university.
