Sunday, May 3rd, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Discover how to create a stylised female character


The Gnomon Workshop has released Creating a Stylized Female Character, a new workshop setting out DNEG senior modeler Crystal Bretz‘s modeling, texturing, grooming and look development workflows.

Over the course of more than six hours of video training, Bretz demonstrates how to create an entire character, complete with hair and clothing, working in ZBrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Mari and Arnold.

A complete guide to modelling and texturing a character, and creating clothing and hair
In the tutorial, Bretz sets out her entire process for translating a 2D concept into a finished 3D character, working from a character design created by Angel Ganev.

She begins by taking a stock base mesh – available to download with the video training – and sculpting the character’s body and face in ZBrush. Props are created in Maya and 3D clothing in Marvelous Designer.

Bretz then discusses how to retopologise the original high-res assets into lower-poly production-ready geometry, and how to UV unwrap the model and optimise the UVs for texturing in Mari.

Having posed the character in ZBrush, Bretz move to Maya to demonstrate her grooming workflow, using the software’s XGen toolset to create hair and fuzz on the character’s clothes.

The tutorial concludes with a section on look dev, demonstrating how to set up render layers to generate final images of the character using the Arnold renderer.

About the artist
Crystal Bretz is a senior modeller at DNEG, having previously worked at visual effects and animation facilities including Method Studios, Bron Animation and Artifex Studios.

She has worked on a range of movies, episodic TV series and short films, including Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Black Panther and Netfilx animated feature The Willoughbys.

Pricing and availability
Creating a Stylized Female Character is available via an online subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, giving you access to over 300 detailed tutorials. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $490/year.

Read more about Creating a Stylized Female Character on The Gnomon Workshop’s website


Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.