Introduction Research Turnarounds Beauty Shots Evaluation
What is ParaNorman? Produced by Laika Studios. Stop-motion animated, comedy horror film. First ever stop motion film to use full-colour 3D printers for replacement animation.
Clay-like hair, with sculpted detail to give the illusion of hair strands.
Variation of character body shape and features. Exaggerated elements.
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Focusing on a feature such as the chin and neck and pushing design to extreme.
Focusing on the flow of the hair around the face. Also gives an idea to the form of the character’s skull in this style.
Neutral colour palette, brighter tones used to highlight unique elements of the character.=, e.g. the scarf.
Characters have 1 or 2 unique exaggerated features, in this instance the brow and mouth.
Generally quite pastel colours.
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Each character has their own personality. Reflected in their posing.
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Early concept art details large head, small limbs, wide stance, rubber-like limbs and far set eyes.
Skin appears matte, red/warm tones used to highlight cheeks, nose and brow.
Features such as the forehead exaggerated and extruded out of the head.
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Texture of the denim on the main jacket is coarser than that on the arms, also identified the gold-coloured stitching around seams.
Easy to identify the way the clothing folds flow around the arms. Also provides a good idea of the colour palette to use. Took pictures of the ears and mouth to try and replicate - as closely as possible, my likeness.
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Side views of the nose and of the upper lip helped to visualise the flow of geometry.
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Front Back Side
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Textures
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Hair
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Rough Denim
Felt/Fleece
Back
Front
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Smooth Denim
Tried to keep the colour palette to a few minimal colours.
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Silhouette + Form A character’s form could be it’s defining feature, in ParaNorman there are lots of varied body types that are often exaggerated to portray the character’s personality. The head is often the largest object, with the torso and limbs both being around roughly 1 and ½ heads.
Large ears, hair shape and jacket as identifiable features.
Tried to keep design identifiable from the silhouette.
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Back Right Front Left
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I initially created my base mesh, by using primitive shapes such as the cylinder and box meshes. I then extruded and modified these to create elements such as the legs and shoes. This only has 4,160 polys. Taking into consideration the baking process, I decided to increase the poly count of my original base by a using TurboSmooth modifier – to create a finished product with a higher resolution. ž View
My final poly count is: 15,911.
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HeadHands (Body) Clothes
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Clothes
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HeadHands (Body)
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Diffuse Normal Roughness, Metallic, Ambient Occlusion
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Before After
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Skin Body Based on the ‘Skin Face’ smart material. I modified the base skin colours to be paler, and also used the mask tool to add a red colouring to the cheeks, eyes, and tops of ears. I also reduced the pore detailing to be more in keeping with the Laika style.
Based on the ‘Skin Human Simple’ smart material. I also reduced the skin colour to be a paler tone.
I also reduced the veins and dots detailing, as this material was only used on the hands and neck – where there shouldn’t be this level of detail. Lastly I increased ‘Top Color’ to a redder tone to add some depth to the skin.
Additional Detail These layers contain alpha and projected detail. The hair was created by adding a base fill layer, with a brushed finish filter – to try and emulate the detail of hair on character’s such as Norman. I decided to do this as I didn’t think sculpting this fine detail would bake well on to the low poly model. Lastly I projected the iris’ from a base texture, and added some fine facial markings.
Projected Iris Texture
Finish Brushed Linear
Jacket + Shirt
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Fabric Soft Denim
Fabric Denim Base
Cotton
The fabric on the main jacket is rougher and has diagonal ridges, so was based on the ‘Fabric Soft Denim’ smart material. The sleeves had a lot less height information, so used the ‘Fabric Denim Base’ smart material.
Lower Leg These layers are a duplication of the ‘Skin Body’ material set up from the Body textures. Originally I hadn’t intended for this area to be skin, the leggings were intended to have some sculpted clothing folds here, but due to time constraints I repurposed this to become an ankle/lower leg.
I had some difficulty finding a material to modify for the shirt, so I found a ‘Cotton’ material from Substance Share. Stripe Alpha
Shoes
Additional Detail
The shoes consisted of two main materials, the sole was based on the ‘Rubber Tire’ smart material with a Dirt overlay.
Contains fine details such as buttons and button holes, lighter denim around the hems and stitching on the seams. I used the ‘Stitches Small’ brush with height enabled, and also utilised a wooden button tool from Substance Share, with a steel material overlay to replicate the button detail on the jacket.
The main canvas, also utilised the ‘Fabric Denim Base’ material.
Rubber Tire
Dirt
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Character Bio Clumsy girl, aspiring games artist and selfconfessed foodie. Amy is generally goodnatured, though at times can be rather blunt and sarcastic. Her interest in games started at a young age and bloomed a bit more when she enrolled at Teesside University. Despite mistakenly enrolling on a programming course and being considerably confused by calculus for a solid year, she miraculously survived and now believes to be pursuing her dream career. Amy looks forward to what the future may hold for her.
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I started out this project by compiling lots of reference images to better understand the art style of ParaNorman. From my research, I learned that this art style makes use of exaggerated proportions and features, has easily recognisable silhouettes and clean shapes
Based on this I took reference images of myself and began to create some concepts of my character, which I then used as a template to create my base mesh on. It was particularly helpful to develop the side and ž views to make the 3D result overall more accurate.
Early mood boards helped me to identify key features of the ParaNorman art style.
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To counter this I started again, utilising simple primitive cylinders and boxes – which were further refined using edge loops and scaling.
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After receiving some feedback on my base mesh, it was decided that I was using too much geometry.
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It was at this point that I fell a little behind in comparison to my peers, but due to the nature of the ParaNorman style – it was imperative that I got the base mesh as pristine as I could, to make the sculpting phase easier. I had notable difficulty with the hair, initially creating this out of shelled planes, but later settling with using squashed cylinders. I went through a few iterations of this mesh until I finally unwrapped the model and imported it into to ZBrush. I found ZBrush very difficult to adapt to at first and often encountered issues that I couldn’t troubleshoot. I overcame this by studying the documentation and following the demos within the sessions. Finished base mesh, with more evenly distributed geometry.
Introduction Research Turnarounds Beauty Shots Evaluation
Due to the remaining time I had at this point I made the decision to only focus on sculpting some basic clothing folds in to maximise my time texturing, which is an area that I am more confident in. I created the folds by first dragging out areas of the sleeves using the move tool, and then adding inset and raised areas using the dam_standard brush – before finally smoothing these out.
As my mesh consisted of two components, the ‘HeadHands’ and ‘Clothes’ I imported these into the software as an .fbx. This made it a little confusing on export, but after researching the issues I was encountering online I learned about the ‘FBXExportImprort’ in the ‘ZPlugins’ drop down. After a considerable amount of trial and error I was able to bake my mesh out within Substance Painter. I’m not completely happy with the results as there are some notable baking errors, but I do feel as though I’d be able to remedy this if I had more time.
Rewelding the jacket caused me to resculpt the sleeve folds.
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Another involves the quality of the unwrap, as this is the first time I have used pelt mapping the final result isn’t as ideal as it should be. For example, In areas around the lips the UV is tangled – despite relaxing. This made texturing quite difficult and due to this the lips have no colour and shares the same material as the face skin.
Gaps could be resolved by creating larger spheres inside the head.
Introduction Research Turnarounds Beauty Shots Evaluation
Despite how technically challenging I found this assessment, I’m very thankful for the introduction to ZBrush and the sculpting process. This is something I would like to incorporate in my environment work, in order to achieve a higher level of detail, and a more visually impressive result.
I always strive and look for creative ways to present my work, and because of this I really enjoy the documentation aspect at the end of each assessment. Overall, I’m proud of what I’ve managed to produce and the issues I’ve overcome over the course of this piece of work. I look forward to utilising and further developing my new found sculpting skills, in any further projects!