ELLIE

We have been huge fans of the franchise and therefore we started our own “ambitious” character project to identify the most common problems which can appear on the way and more importantly to be able to put a time table on it, actually to know how much time does it take create something like this so we can evaluate our future projects more realistically.

After collecting tons of references and guide photos it was time to start blocking out our geometry. To do that we used a generic base mesh from Zbrush for the body and everything started to revolve around it. After placing the proxy geometry we started sculpting the main body.

We wanted to shift a bit the tone established in the games so we were trying to make Ellie much more mature, to imagine her how it will look like in the future or in her 30s. A more defined jaw line and aged skin micro details.

When doing complex characters we learned to treat everything from the assembly as individual “small projects”, giving the same importance even for the unseen and small parts. This way we can assure in the end a high quality standard for close-up shots and far ones as well. This approach will remain in our philosophy of bringing high quality products and services.

After finishing the model with all its parts and doing constant testing, to see if the displacement textures and UV mapping are working properly, we felt confident to start the texturing phase. A good tip for everybody starting out in this field is to not start texturing if you haven’t properly finished the sculpting and modeling phase. Somethimes you can run out of energy from working on a project for too much time and you want to skip some steps in order to advance. Totally not recomended. It will rebound later on causing much more problems and eventually it will cost you more time than you tought.

A nice thing we found useful was the mix between displacement made in Zbrush and additional displacement made with Substance painter. To use it effectively, we blended the two using Substance Designer to have a final texture which we can use for the final material.

Always check the AOVs of passes. For each asset we analyse the passes to identify errors or to further enhance the look we are going for. This became a standard procedure by us.

For the clothing we used Marvelous Designer. Once the garments were created, we imported them intro Zbrush to further detail them and add micro details.

Below we wanted to show the level of detail we wanted to put in every asset from this project. This is still a work in progress, currently working on the grooming phase using XGen. More details and updates are bound to come, so if you are curious about it you can check the News&Breakdowns or subscribe to our Newsletter to receive news about our studio. Thanks.