I started to design my character after finished the script. The character is a man who works as an architect/designer in a company. The character should wear like an office stuff. Therefore, I draw an outfit design for the character. The design is quite normal. The man is wearing blue shirt, jeans and sneakers.
Below is the design of the character:
After that I modeled the character. I firstly find a free male base character on website and reshape his head in Zbrush to get the result that I want. I then find our clothes in character creator 4, which is quite suitable for my character.
I then used Substance Painter and Mari to paint skin textures of this character. I spent most of the time making diffuse texture, normal and SSS textures because these textures will significantly affect the quality of character rendering. Especially the SSS ( sub-surface scattering) texture, which judges the texture of human bone and skin.
After that I also used the base model to generate the human-like creature for this animation. The creature has a giant and weird mouth which is full of blood. It also has long fingers, which looks creepy. I also want the creature looks like a dead body and has some blood on it’s skin. Therefore, I used Substance Painter to make another version of skin texture. This skin texture has more green and blue colors on it to mimic the dead body texture. I used some physical brush to paint blood on the model so that it can form quite realistic blood flow effects on the body. These brushs are really handy, which can also be used in the texturing of environment.