ZBrush Tutorial: A Sharing of 3D Stylized Cheongsam Women
In this article, Fox Renderfarm, the best cloud rendering provider and render farm, will share with you Pierson Pang's works of stylized cheongsam girl and approximate production process and experience.
Pierson Pang is a 3D character designer who has participated in many AAA realistic and stylized projects in Europe and America, specializing in European and American cartoons and realism.
© Pierson Pang
He mainly uses the software ZBrush and Blender. Use the sculpting software ZBrush with the emerging set of modeling to render in Blender, can maximize the production efficiency.
First look at the final result:
© Pierson Pang
© Pierson Pang
© Pierson Pang
1. Ideas and Reference Collection
Pierson initially wanted to do an exercise in generalizing the female body. He combined Chinese femininity and chose the cheongsam for the costume. But at the same time, he wanted to maximize the female form, so made a little change to the cheongsam's shape. Because there was no specific original drawing, he looked for some reference drawings that fit the image in his mind before making it.
He looked for exaggerated anatomical drawings of the form as well as fashion show type for reference, which determined the final direction of the character's temperament. Although there are often improvised ideas in future productions, they are within the larger framework. That's why accurate reference is important, as it guides the right production direction.
© Pierson Pang
2. Making the Model
Compared with realistic characters, the model of stylized characters requires more general refinement and exaggeration of human silhouette structure and muscle anatomy, and focuses on the overall relationship of sparseness, rhythm and hierarchy of the character. And the stylized character will first discard the irrelevant details.
A little advice for beginners:
If you want to exercise sensitivity to body type, then you can do a lot of body type generalization exercises at first, including various body types (fat, thin, women of various body proportions).
Like the following figure: this combination of deformation through the simplest of spheres will maximize the removal of details, thus focusing all attention on the characteristics of the shape itself. Strengthening this exercise will quickly improve one's ability to capture the shape. The same applies to the character's face, which will be more delicate and faint compared to the larger forms.
© Pierson Pang
Back to the cheongsam girl, Pierson did volumetric generalization on the body shape (elbow joint, knee joint, interpolation generalization between each muscle), emphasizing the contrast between the block structure and the curves of the legs and upper arms.
In the profile form, the fullness and curves of the arms and thighs need to be noted.
For blocky hair, you need to pay attention to its rhythmic contrast such as sparse and dense layers. The volume structure of the face is mixed with softness and hardness, so it needs to be interspersed to deal with it. Regarding facial treatment, there are various styles of cartoonish block treatment depending on the project.
Pierson's way is a combination of soft and blocky interspersed treatment, meaning that there is a sense of breathing. In fact, this sense of breathing is throughout the body in his work. How to grasp the overall rhythm? How to choose the detailed contrast of the specific partial rhythm under the overall rhythm is needed to be carefully examined.
© Pierson Pang
After the model is almost done, you can directly use ZBrush to paint the vertex color to observe the character effect.
Pierson has always felt that the white model does not represent the end of the high modeling stage. The top color is needed to judge the character's temperament, and painting the top color usually requires learning more about women's makeup. The choice of eye shadow type, the choice of lipstick number, what kind of character positioning and temperament they correspond to, are all very sophisticated and also exercise aesthetics. So you can observe more during your day. The aesthetics of a character's final effect is very important. The software and method skills are all auxiliary. The level of completion of the vertex color can be based on your own preferences, as long as you can roughly express the feeling of the character on the line, or to handle finely, as a base for post mapping.
In ZBrush, you can use the skin material ball to observe the effect, as follows:
© Pierson Pang
After the Tpose effect is determined, use ZBrush's Transpose Master to give the character a pose, but many people prefer to use DAZ to make it because it is more convenient. Transpose Master is more difficult to pose with, but can exercise dynamic anatomical ability.
© Pierson Pang
Pierson usually does not put too much effort into the practice of low-poly modeling and the process behind it, as long as it can express the effect he wants to achieve. Pierson used to paint the vertex color with ZBrush and import it into Blender to render the picture by using the vertex color with the material ball. Of course, it is also possible to draw mapping in a more detailed way to adjust the effect in Blender.
3. Blender Render
About the renderer, he earlier used Keyshort, V-Ray and such renderers, as well as Arnold, which is used by many people to do realistic rendering. Blender is a free software with less complex material and lighting properties compared to Arnold, including WYSIWYG rendering speed and render quality, which are friendly to stylized characters.
Blender has two rendering methods: eevee and cycles.
Eevee is Blender's real-time rendering engine, implemented using OpenGL technology to focus on speed and interactivity while achieving the goal of rendering PBR materials. Eevee can be used interactively in 3D viewports and can also generate high-quality rendering.
Eevee uses the same shader nodes as cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For cycles users, you can use eevee to preview material effects before using cycles to render the final image to improve efficiency.
Unlike cycles, eevee is not a ray tracing engine. It uses multiple algorithms via rasterization to estimate how the light acts with the object's material, while cycles is based on physical ray tracing to calculate the bounce of each ray. Although eevee is designed to use PBR shading materials, it is not perfect. Cycles renderer provides physically more accurate rendering, while Eevee uses rasterized rendering so it has significant limitations.
Each of these two rendering methods has its own features and can be chosen according to your character rendering needs.
You can read the official tutorials for details: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/3.3/render/lights/light_object.html#renderer-settings
There are also many Blender tutorials on YouTube, such as: https://www.youtube.com/c/DannyMac3d
You can check out more works of Pierson Pang at at his Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/piersonpang
Fox Renderfarm hopes it will be of some help to you. We are an excellent cloud rendering services provider in the CG world, so if you need to find a Blender render farm, why not try Fox Renderfarm, which is offering a free $25 trial for new users? Thanks for reading!
By Thepoly
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