My name is Nicolas Brunet and I’m a “one man band” French CG artist living in Nantes, France. Some of my past work include intense VFX projects like Versus: The Way to Shadow and more recently, full CGI animated short films like the Christmas in Alsace commercial series. Working on all aspects of my projects is time consuming therefore since a few months, I am focusing on modeling, texturing, artworks and animated short films creation. In this spotlight I’d like to come back on the creation process of my last artwork “月 (Tsuki)”
Origin
月 (Tsuki) is part of a Zbrush training I experimented one year ago. The goal of the exercise was to create a new model every day from a simple dynamesh sphere. Right before summer this year, I was looking at my past projects and remembered this girl portrait that was almost complete, fortunately last year I exported a FBX version of the scene, therefore I decided to finish the project in 3ds Max by adding a clean topology, more details, hairs and an environment my CG friend could live in.
It took a while to get there, fortunately friends like Alex Alvarez and l’Andalou gave me some good feedback to improve what I’ve already achieved.
Texturing
One of the goals of this project was to create the textures with Allegorithmic tools. Mission completed at 95%! Only the moon and clouds embroideries are hand painted but everything else is made procedurally: eyes, clothes, signs, buildings, etc.
Hair
It seems I’m struggling with CG Hair generation since my Alice in Wonderland artwork, the good news is I finally established a workflow to chase away this painful process: In 3ds Max, using FurGuides Painter I draw a spline cage on temporary geometries, then I add a Hair&Fur modifier to generate splines between the existing ones and export this as the main Hair guides. I end the process adding Hair Farm modifiers to this guide cage and voilà. I must admit that I have summarized a lot this workflow but here is a video showing the creation of hair:
Presentation
Once I completed and uploaded my artwork I managed to work on a Real Time version for people to look at the details I created on the model and as I heard Sketchfab released SSS option in their viewer, I jumped into an optimization process to make my model real time ready! My girl has now an alternative hairstyle and a new environment you can freely navigate in.
Here is a video showing how I baked hair information into low poly geometries:
Closing Notes
If you want to know more about the project, I invite you to read the full making of here and then why not follow me to get updated about my next projects at my website, blog and Facebook? See you!
About the author
Nicolas Brunet
“One man band” French CG artist living in Nantes, France.
