Tutorials
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Hippie The Forest Dragon
August 20, 2024
Hippie is a Flower type Lizard probably living in some forest in a child's dream. She has the body of a lizard but a personality that seems much like a dog's. This cute little forest dragon comes with the perfect disguise. In her free time she loves to chase butterflies and stand by some flowers and pretend to be one. If she had a superpower, I'd imagine it would have something to do with being able to camouflage and transform along with an ability to transform someone's stress or sadness into happiness when they pat her head!
As a little girl I was and still am fond of the anime series "Pokemon'' and love their world filled with cute but powerful creatures. I admire the creativity that they have put in to design these unique characters and I wanted to make something like that someday. For the look of my asset, I took inspiration from the live action movie "Detective Pikachu'' that features stylized yet semi realistic creatures and tried to achieve a similar look.
I took on this project to learn about different materials, few of which I hadn't explored before this attempt and also to expand my knowledge of Mari and Substance Painter. All in all, this project has been a great learning experience for me as someone who has recently entered the 3d industry.
The first step of starting any new project is to collect references as this is one step that is equally important as proper texturing or lookdev, if not more. I gathered references for different materials and also some images I took as inspiration and compiled them in a reference board with the help of a software named Pureref. Here is a glimpse of some of my main references.
Mood Board
I started out in Maya with a basic default Lizard base mesh from Maya's library. The next step was to have a basic shape and position of the front and back legs to match it slightly to look more like a hybrid between a Salamander and a Komodo Dragon. For the face, I tried to get a Gecko's face shape and then I tweaked the areas near the nose and cheeks to achieve a more stylized shape.
Once I had blocked out a basic shape for the body, I took planes to block the Leafy fins as well as the Petal shaped ears. I did not add too many details in Maya Since I had left a major portion of detailing for ZBrush. After doing the UVs in Maya, I jumped straight to sculpting in ZBrush.
UVs from Maya
I started sculpting larger details on the low poly base to add details such as refining the Arms and Legs by adding thickness, changing the shape of the Fingers, sculpting the loose skin hanging from the Neck, Thickening the chest area and thinning the area near the hind legs, giving thick thighs on the legs etc. Next, I started to add Subdiv levels to add secondary forms such as folds, some light muscle details visible through the skin and details on the nostrils and near the eyes.
Large Details On Lower Subdiv
The final step in sculpting was to add finer details such as thin wrinkles. Instead of Zbrush I chose Substance Painter ro add micro displacements such as leathery skin details and the veins on the leaves. For the Veins on the leaves, I used information from the Color map and some masks instead of sculpting it on ZBrush.
Finer Details Like Skin Folds
I kept my model in T pose to finish my texturing work so that I can work in symmetry for the most part and decided to pose the asset after texturing was complete.
I recommend testing out how well a model responds in terms of SSS while working with creatures. I made sure to get some renders from different angles of the base model with just the SSS parameter applied in the material. Once the results were satisfactory, I moved on to texturing.
SSS tests
I like to start my Texturing with Color/Albedo and use it as a base to drive most of the information on the secondary maps. For the Color map, I prefer Mari since it has some great procedural nodes and for the secondary maps such as Roughness and Displacement, I used Substance painter.
For the body, I used procedural tools to create the textures and variation and for leaves and petals I used a combination of Projecting images as well as procedural techniques. This is how my color map came along from start to end.
Mari Color/Albedo Process For The Body
Mari Color/Albedo Process For The Eye
For displacement/height map, I prefer Substance Painter since it gives a fair estimate of the output on the viewport itself. This saved a lot of time on render iterations for every small tweak. To have more control on the intensity of the bump and displacement in different parts of the body, I used Layer Displacement workflow. This allowed me to tweak the intensity of a specific part of the body through a Remap node and a mask to control the area.
A tip to save some render time is to try and achieve larger deformations using displacement and get micro details through Bump even while using the same height map in both. Trying to get all the details including micro ones through just Displacement, one might end up reducing the micropolygon length too much to be able to see fine details. On the other hand, it’s much lighter to get those details in Bump instead.
For this asset, my base model was already quite high poly so to try and make it lighter, I increased the micropolygon length to a value of 1.5 from the default value of 1. It can be found in the Render Settings under Renderman.
Another thing to keep in mind is to check on “Watertight Dicing”. I started to get some holes along the seams when working with Displacement, so checking this option helped sort that issue.
To be extra sure that there are no holes in the geometry, I also checked an option called “Prevent Polygon Cracking” which can be found in the object’s Attribute Editor’s Shape node, under the Renderman’s Displacement Tab.
This is how the base model looks before and after the Displacement.
Displacement Test
Creating RGB masks of all the major areas where I wanted separate control was very important for this approach. This came in very handy at the time of Lookdev, especially when it came to tweaking the bump and displacement or having separate control over SSS and transmission in different areas.
RGB Maps
After completing texturing work, I came back to Zbrush to pose my model. As a last step I had to add and subtract a few wrinkles and folds here and there to match with the new pose. I also added some asymmetry and "flow" to the leaves and petals. For this entire process, I decided to use layering in ZBrush as it involved a little trial and error. I used separate layers for the pose and the new wrinkles and the sculpting on the leaves and petals.
Layerwise Posing Tweaks
To make this asset look convincing, I was required to work with a lot of different materials but I did not have different geometries to assign these materials to. All the different materials needed to combine under a single master shader so I thought the best approach for this kind of an asset would be layer shading using "PxrLayerMixer" and "PxrLayer" nodes to separate these different properties and use masks for a smooth transition between materials.
I had separate shader control for different areas of the body like the Petals, Leaves, Feet, area around the Eyes, Belly, Neck, Antenna, Tongue, Mouth etc.
Layer Shader Setup
AOV Passes
The lookdev for petals was one of the more crucial materials because it had to look thin and also transmit light the way flower petals do. Initially I tried to achieve the look through SSS with the help of a mask.
However, I was not satisfied with these results as the petals started to look more like wax, and the bright backlit tint was missing. To overcome this, I thought of a different approach where I combined Transmission using the Glass parameter along with SSS. To gain extra control, I used PxrRemap and PxrColorCorrect nodes.
Petals Passes
Petals Shader
The geometry of the leaves is slightly thicker than the Petals so unlike the material for the petals, I did not need to use the transmission to get the backlit look similar to the petal. This is the result I got just using the SSS parameter.
Beauty vs transmission Mask
I noticed in a lot of references that the eyes of frogs and some other reptiles have a metallic look. There are also gold foil-like flakes on some of them. I found it interesting and tried to achieve a similar look in Hippie’s eyes.
For the Iris and Sclera, I used both SSS and Specular Edge Color. For the metallic look, I increased the IOR slightly. This gave me that semi metallic look. Although the eye has that metallic shine but still it’s not really a true metal. In the end, it’s an organic material so instead of letting just the Specularity drive the color, I had combined it with subsurface to get some contribution from SSS as well.
For the golden flakes, I initially started off with just Specular Edge Color and cranked up the IOR to a much higher value to give it a pure metallic look. However, It would look almost black in the areas where little to no light hit. So ultimately, I stuck to the same approach as the rest of the eye but I kept the IOR higher that helped me get the shine similar to golden foil that I was going for.
Eye Closeup Render
After all the hard work it was finally time to see Hippie come to life. To test out the material response I did some object and light turntable renders of the asset in different lighting environments like Studio, Sunny and Overcast using suitable HDRIs from Polyhaven. I also used one of Cave Academy’s calibrated studio lighting set up for calibration as well as showcasing my asset. Here are some still frames as well as turntables of all the various lighting I used.
For lighting I did a simple 3 point lighting using Disk lights for Key and Fill light and a Rect light for Rim light. I added another Disk light with lower intensity to get the specular in the Right eye.
3 Point Lighting On Maya Viewport
And Finally... Here we are!
It's Hippie!
I have always been an artistic person, so a profession related to art and creativity was my obvious career choice. I started my journey as a Graphic Designer, but there was something very fulfilling about creating 3d art that drew me closer to this industry and now I aspire to make a great career in 3d. I started working in this industry professionally as a Texturing and Lookdev artist at MPC Bangalore. Currently doing some freelance and working on upgrading my skills and portfolio.
This project is available with a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This allows you to share and redistribute for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the original authors.
