Team From Earth explained how their realistic 3D model of Santa was created, detailed the modeling and texturing pipelines, and explained how his clothes were made in Marvelous Designer.
Team From Earth is a realistic character and environment art production studio for AA and AAA games and animations.
Rather than attempting to be a jack of all trades, we are committed to seeking the perfect synergy between artists' passions and specialization and the demands of the market. Our services:
Established in 2022, we've already been participating in exciting AAA projects, and are open for a few more partnerships in 2024.
Character design is a powerful tool for conveying emotions and narratives. It's essential to keep the character's personality and the intended vibe in mind during the production process. Through elements like design, shape, color, and other visual cues, you can effectively tell a story and create an emotional connection with the player or user.
Santa Claus is indeed a symbol of joy and happiness, particularly during the holiday season. The enchanting concept of a magical figure who can visit every home in one night and grant wishes fosters a profound sense of wonder and excitement. When creating a 3D model of Santa Claus, it's crucial to capture and convey this sense of enchantment and wonder to evoke those positive emotions associated with the holiday season.
Here are three fundamental aspects of 3D characters, drawing from our extensive years of experience:
Characters are often categorized based on their interaction with the player and how they're presented in the game world. Here's a breakdown of these character categories:
Santa Claus model was created as a hero character or interactive NPC:
When considering production speed, here is a rough estimate for a skilled artist if you decide to outsource a high-quality character from Team From Earth similar to Santa Claus:
When envisioning character design to showcase the TFE's capabilities and quality, we aimed for a unique approach. Instead of choosing a standard male avatar, art director wanted to play with unique body shapes and opted for an older face to highlight the team's skill in complex face sculpting. This led to the idea of creating Santa for our portfolio demonstration.
The greatest value lies in being a cohesive team rather than a group of individual artists, as Team from Earth’s projects are a collective effort rather than a collection of individual pieces of work. In the outsourcing business, it's crucial to ensure that a team of 10 artists can deliver assets that seamlessly match the quality and style of a single artist's work.
The Santa Claus project exemplifies this teamwork, with three artists collaborating on a Santa character and two outfits. They shared stylization specifics and worked cohesively.
Drawing inspiration from vintage Santa Claus illustrations gives us the opportunity to evoke that warm, nostalgic feeling associated with the holidays. In today's world, Santa costumes often lack uniqueness and can feel mass-produced. That's why we're exploring the old-school representation of Santa, aiming to capture the classic, timeless charm and the cozy, traditional holiday magic that sets our character apart.
The first challenge was a lack of CG references for Santa Claus that could be used. Of course, we didn’t make anything completely unique in terms of the stylization, but it’s always better if you have the ability to see the existing similar models to be inspired by a good part of them and to avoid mistakes that you don’t like. In our case we couldn't find any nice-looking realistic Santa, so decided to share it with the community if anyone needs it for their game, event, or animation or just for educational purposes. It’s available for purchase now at the Unreal Engine Marketplace and ArtStation.
No specific face picture was used as a direct reference for our Santa. Instead, we curated a selection of images that captured the desired vibe. The ultimate goal was to create a Santa that we genuinely liked and, more importantly, one that our kids would believe in. We approached the design process following our standard pipeline with likeness requirements. In this article, we will focus on the most challenging part of the process – achieving a great sculpt.
Generally, there are two ways to start the head: from scratch and from a base mesh. In this case, we used the second option. If you use the DynaMesh tool in Zbrush, it’s important to have good control of the mesh to tweak it more easily, so there should be some retopology after the DynaMesh stage. Also, it’s a good idea to have some UVs.
Sculpting. Primary and secondary shapes
The work is started by sculpting the main forms, followed by secondary details later. There shouldn’t be any work on small details while searching for shapes. Here are a few pieces of advice that could be helpful at this stage of production:
Sculpting. Smaller details
At a certain stage, once we've established the correct direction for the primary and secondary forms, it's time to incorporate smaller details. We utilized various head scans and ZWrap to generate multiple displacement levels, blending them while preserving intricate details on separate layers.
It's a kind of multi-layer sandwich, structured something like this (from bottom to top):
During the second group of layers, we can create a rough color texture. Color has a heavy influence on appearance and perception, so having some representation of it earlier will give you a more expected result at the end. This method requires to have some retopology on the head, plus the UVs:
After this, the process will go as usual by creating new or adjusted low poly that matches technical requirements, baking, and final texturing.
To craft a realistic head texture, it's crucial to consider the color variations present in our skin. The skin exhibits a diverse hue range, including shades of blue, red, yellow, and magenta. This variation depends on factors such as the specific head zone, age, gender, and the surrounding environment. Additionally, since our skin is partly translucent, veins and capillaries may be visible. To achieve authenticity, it's recommended to find high-quality references and thoroughly explore them.
For creating hair textures, we used XGen in Maya. The placement of hair cards was facilitated by the excellent GS CurveTools plug-in. This plugin enhances Maya's curve modification toolset, allowing us to create hair cards on the fly, and it's mostly non-destructive, which is fantastic for this kind of work.
When it comes to placing cards, it's more efficient to do it with layers, such as:
Helpful hints:
The whole process requires patience, so take your time. It might not look perfect from the start. Good file and layer organization are essential to avoid getting overwhelmed while tweaking thousands of cards.
To showcase our approach to textiles, we’d like to walk you through the Vintage outfit creation and some challenges that were faced.
Reference board
The very first stage of any 3D asset production is to plan the work, assemble questions regarding the concept, gather references, and be ready to start. The perfect reference board consists of:
But, as mentioned earlier, creating a realistic 3D model for Santa Claus faced a challenge as there were no great models available on the internet. We hope that our outcome will raise the standards of digital Santa Clauses, and we anticipate seeing more great models by next Christmas.
Marvelous Designer simulation
While the shirt and pants have simple patterns, Santa's extra weight required us to experiment with the shape of the fabric pieces to achieve realistic folds that look good and meet the rig requirements.
Usually, we simulate the entire outfit in one scene to understand the interaction between clothing pieces, so we added suspenders during the Marvelous Designer stage to ensure the fabric would react realistically. In the realistic 3D clothing creation process we aim to achieve about 80% of the final quality in Marvelous Designer.
Final HP in ZBrush
When the simulation result was good enough, the model was exported to ZBrush to clean up the mesh and give it some thickness. During this transition, you may notice some differences in how the model looks in ZBrush compared to Marvelous Designer due to variations in shaders and viewport settings between the two programs. You may need to make some adjustments in Marvelous Designer until the model looks good in ZBrush.
After cleaning up the mesh, we add thickness to mimic real-life fabrics. This process increases the polygon count in the scene so to make the ZBrush file a bit lighter we recommend removing the backsides of the fabric that won't be visible. Once the model is optimized, it's ready for detailing.
Elements such as stitching, seams, memory folds, and minor wear and tear are incorporated only after the folds are approved. The micro-detailed texture of the fabric wasn't added at the high-poly stage; it was done during the texture stage. To craft stitching along seams, we employ brushes with alphas, as demonstrated in the GIF below:
LP, UV, and Bake
The next steps – the low-poly, UVs, and baking maps – are pretty standard. For this particular model, the shirt presented the biggest challenge with its numerous folds. When retopologizing elements like this, it's important to avoid non-planar polygons, which can be identified using Maya's CleanUp tool.
Here are basic technical requirements that we use at Team from Earth that should help to avoid common mistakes:
LP
UV
Bake
Textures
Depending on the project requirements, the character textures could have either a clean appearance or be dirtied up with additional wear and tear, stains, and more. In this case, we aimed for a relatively clean look to be sure that Santa looks attractive.
There is an important step in texturing that shouldn't be skipped – finding the right references to understand the desired level of detail.
The pipeline for textile texturing is the following:
We work with each channel individually, switching between Color, Roughness, and Normal channels to ensure that each channel provides the right information for the material properties:
Maintaining a well-organized folder hierarchy and naming conventions is crucial to be sure that the art director or any other artist can understand your file and make changes faster if needed.
Setting up materials for Unreal Engine 5
To ensure that we create game-ready models, not just visually appealing art pieces, at Team From Earth, we test all assets in the engine or viewer before submission. For these Santa models, we exported them into Unreal Engine 5. It’s a user-friendly engine for setting up materials and basic shaders to achieve a visually pleasing result. If you have never tried viewing the work in any engine, we strongly suggest starting as it's a must-have to understand how texture maps truly work. We recommend beginning with Unreal; even artists with limited engine experience can easily dive into it.
Unreal has a built-in shader node editor that is capable of creating a vast variety of materials for any task, it’s intuitive to use especially if you are creating something not too complicated. In our case, we used it to create a flexible shader that can modify hair color in various ways.
To achieve a good-looking fabric, we also added some parameters to the clothing in the engine. And here is another advantage of Unreal is its support for users and the provision of useful documentation. In our case, we utilized guidelines on implementing Fresnel in materials. However, when seeking information about the engine, be cautious – it's constantly developing and upgrading. Make sure you find solutions tailored to the specific version you're using.
While the beard and hair were placed by hand, we tried to optimize this process for the fur, since it's not a focal point of a character and by itself is less unique compared to hair. In this case, we were using Blender’s particle system in the hair mode by following this pipeline:
It saved us around 2-3 days of work compared to hand-placing haircards. Such cards generator could be done through other tools, but we found that Blender’s particle system is more user-friendly and faster for such tasks.
Creating appealing renders is important for showcasing your portfolio, whether you're selling assets on a marketplace or presenting your work to a team, employer, or client. In a visually-oriented world, we're accustomed to perceiving beautiful images, and we can't overstate the significance of achieving high-quality, quickly-produced render results.
Render is basically a photoshoot of your character, so to have a better render, we need to research how it’s done in real-life scenarios. If you are using Marmoset for it, we recommend switching the tone mapping of your camera to ACES, it gives a richer color range, and an overall more realistic look.
First of all our character should have a floor, unless we are creating a Space Santa, which is kinda possible if you think about it. The earth version of Santa should have some ground. If you search for some photo studios, it also has a wall behind. We need those surfaces so the light can bounce off it and light up parts of the character.
After that, we need to create light sources. There are a lot of light position variants you can find online, it’s all about what mood you want to give to your character. Some of them are more dramatic, some are more natural. In our case, we use some basic lighting:
It’s better to render in 16-bit PSD, especially if you plan to make additional adjustments in Photoshop, for example. Experiment at this stage; test your work from a distance as usual. The character's idea should be easily discernible from afar. Try viewing it on various devices, such as your phone, as each monitor is slightly different, and not all of them are color-calibrated.
Remember to enjoy your work, this is an important goal!