Tattoo Man
concept by Wouter Tulp
Made with Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop, VRay, and NUKE. Rendered with VRay in Maya.
Concept
This gorgeous concept created by Wouter Tulp and can be seen here:
https://cara.app/post/a574b1c2-54c8-4e38-adb3-984012743d68
Breakdown- Render
Progress Renders
Wireframe
Posing with Blend Shapes
I found that to get the clean, round, stylized shapes I wanted, directly sculpting my poses in ZBrush was more ideal than anything involving rigging and skinning. I sculpted my characters and plush toys into the poses I wanted, then applied that as a blend shape in Maya. I kept the sculpted mesh and continued to update my shapes in Maya, so that they work as well as possible in my composition and with each other.
Tattoo Layers
To have the amount of control that I wanted, I chose to fully re-paint the father's tattoos using fill layers with masks in Substance Painter, then use several layers of additional masks to add age to each of them at the same time.
Breakdown- Hair
For this project, I dove into the world of hair creation in Maya. I used XGen, XGen Interractive Groom, and VRayFur, each for their unique strengths.
XGen-
classic XGen allows the most amount of control, from the tools I tried. I drew each curve based on rough, sculpted block-ins from ZBrush. The XGen systems are generated onto separate geometry, then attached to my main geometry via a Proximity Wrap. As the separate 'cap' geometry is placed exactly over the main geometry, there's no issue with the translation of the points when the blend shape is activated. This let me swap easily between my neutral poses and my sculpted poses.
XGen Interractive Groom-
This is the mid-way point between the amount of control of classic XGen and simplicity of VRayFur. Thus, it was most useful for the fluffier plushies in my scene. From my concept, I knew for sure I would want the Owl and the Bear to be fluffy, and I later added the Dog and the Octopus, as I found I wanted more control than expected. Fluffy plushies need a lot of hairs, but don't need the same amount of guide shape finessing that real hair needs. I also found that the system didn't like the use of more than one density map on the same geometry, so as a workaround, I found that the same Proximity Wrap method that worked for my main characters also works here.
VRayHair-
This method, I found, works best for hair that is so short that shaping guides would be both difficult and, largely, a waste of time, as hair length and its ability to form interesting shapes are positively correlated. Very short hair (like the sort you might find on a velvety plush toy) only needs a little bit of randomness in its direction, and voila! This was the look that I interpreted for the Snake and the Crab. I also found that it helps to make fabric in general look softer and more convincing, so I threw additional VRayHair nodes onto my main characters' clothing.
