Behind the Scenes: Docteur Romarin

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone! My name is Arnaud Bosc, and I am a young 3D artist from France.

My journey began in middle school with SketchUp, and I was essentially just playing around with it, making low-poly models. Getting more and more curious about 3D, I started to go through forums, videos, and various resources to see how I could improve my works, and that’s how I learned about software like 3DS, Maya and, of course, Blender.

Almost eight years and a bachelor’s degree later, I am now a freelance 3D artist specializing in game-ready assets and real-time optimization. I ended up working as a character artist on Twistales, an upcoming action-adventure game by CatOnTree Studio.

INSPIRATION

Basically, I was looking for a character to make in order to learn Marvelous Designer, which I had little to no experience with. And while browsing ArtStation for a cool character concept, I stumbled upon this character design by Fernando Correa.

Long story short, I fell in love with its late 19th century vibe, and started working on it right away.

PROCESS

Sculpting

The very first step of the process was to sculpt the character’s base body. This allows me to define the character and to have a better idea of how it should be represented.

In other words, this allows me to have a strong base to build upon.

Clothing

Next, I booted up Marvelous and started to build the character’s garments. Some elements, like the pouches, bag and belts, were not made with MD, even if I heard it was possible. Basically, I didn’t want to go through the trouble, especially since I’m not sure if it would’ve been better than traditional modeling.

One small mistake that I made here was to use MD’s default avatar rather than my own. I didn’t do so because I wasn’t fully used to the workflow, and I was not confident enough with the software to create and import custom avatars. So I ended up having to fit the final garments to my basemesh, which took me a fair bit of time.

But lesson learned, I guess…?

Adding accessories

Once the clothing was dealt with, I finished the rest of the character by adding his accessories, like the hat, the pouches, and the mask. One small word about the shotgun, which could have its own article, since it was more thought like a separate project rather than an accessory.

Simply put, I’m a huge fan of shooter games and firearms, and wanted to go all-in for the creation of the weapon. It’s not optimized for a third person view but meant more to be a prop with a level of detail worthy of a first person view.

Baking

Once I was done with the retopology and UVs, I went on Marmoset Toolbag to bake all the mesh maps for Painter.

The wide stripe floating on the right of the character was left on purpose, for it allows me to have non-opaque details (rosemary branches, hair, and so on) on the same texture set as the rest. This way, I have less textures and texture sets to manage.

Texturing

When it comes to the texturing process, I don’t have much to say; it’s pretty much your average texturing workflow with Substance Painter. One thing I could mention is the use of a custom texture format which combines 3 grayscale textures (Metallic, Roughness, and AO) into one RGB map.

This has a big benefit when it comes to in-game performance because it reduces the amount of maps that have to be sampled, and it’s a pretty heavy task to perform for whatever game engine you’re using. It’s also simpler to manage across the board, because there are only three to four maps per asset now, against four to six in a more traditional workflow.

Rigging

The last thing I needed to do was rigging. I used a very basic setup with IKs for arms and legs, and as little bones as possible.

Lighting & Rendering

Now I just needed to add a couple lights and render the scene. Note that I used Eevee, because it works better with low-poly, game-ready assets like this one, and also for personal preference.

Et voilà!