Art Spotlight: "Kingdom Hearts - Terra"

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

My name is Nicolas Brunet and I’m a “one man band” French 3D artist living in Nantes. 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 and animated short films creation. In this spotlight I’d like to come back on the creation process of Terra, a model used in one of my personal very short VFX film “Unexpected Gifts“.

Origin

Unexpected Gifts is a parody of “unwrapping videos” we can see a lot on social medias. The project was a VFX test for a coming short film, I wanted to experiment 3D object tracking and facial mocap. Terra has a tiny role in the film, telling it’s time to end the video.

Based on Tetsuya Nomura concept art and images from Kingdom Hearts games, I quickly modelled the character but instead of using the original proportions (longer legs) I adjusted the body and armour to be more real human scale based, I wanted the model to look like a costume a real person could wear.

Turntable video

Texturing

The original textures of Terra were hand painted but for the recent upload of the model on Sketchfab, textures were updated with the help of Substance Designer. Texturing process has never been so fast, in 1 day I could create again the leather and metal materials except this time it was more procedurally done and could be changed on the fly to suits my tastes.

Smart Modeling

The cape was mainly done via texturing. From a simple spline generated mesh I created torn cloth textures inside Substance Designer I could use back in 3ds Max to displace and delete polygons. Check out my tutorial about the 3ds max process here.

Mood

Once all the elements were fully textured it was time to define the mood of the scene. I tried many coloured combination in Mental Ray, iRay and Marmoset Tool Bag.

Presentation

For the Sketchfab scene I choose a low saturated look and a dark background with a bright rim light. I enjoy a lot how the viewer handle the bokeh effect on the particles and shiny elements. Another aspect I love about Sketchfab, unlike uploading a still or video, you’re not bound with the look of your artwork, you can come back anytime in you scene and adjust lights, materials, everything. It’s a real pleasure to use and share our art this way!

Closing Notes

If you enjoyed this article, you can have a look at my past projects and follow me to get updated about the next ones at my website, blog, facebook.

Thanks, Nicolas!