2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest - HellGal - First place winner
Submission for Reallusion's 2024 Character contest, animated stylized category. Won first place.
HellGal is inspired by what could be a mashup between DOOM and HellBoy, trying to mix dark sci-fi with fantasy, with a Tsutomu Nihei vibe.
This was two months worth of night spent mostly figuring out how to consolidate all the different techniques I learned this last few years, into a really nice pipeline, where I can craft films as seamlessly as possible, barely doing anything technical on the character thanks to CC4. Capturing mocap in VR, importing it in iClone, and gathering everything in blender to iterate the film all aspects at once in a single file.
This allows to tweak everything, environment, lighting, animation, final edit, animation polish, vfx, all at the same time, without opening any new file or scene.
https://rebrand.ly/t3m5s6o (Contest Home)
https://rebrand.ly/vy8d2es (Character Creator Home)
https://rebrand.ly/ves8jt3 (iClone Home)
I started with Camilla in CC4, customizing her proportions to follow my concept, small hands and feet, elongated sillhouete. I then started to design her face with FaceTools in Zbrush, already defining her custom expressions and wrinkles. I then used her body as a base to sculpt in 3DCoat, knowing I could use the skinning from CC4 to transfer the weights on my final low poly.
I exported the character to Blender to make a simplified version to mocap in VR with Mocap Fusion, using my low poly environment blockout to walk around. And then import back the same animated armature into iClone. I gathered everything in blender in the end to keep polishing the environement while matching the animation, lighting, vfx, final edit, all in a single blend file.
Character creator is always amazing to kickstart any humanoid character production, already supporting the really accessible facial motion capture in iClone, here with my iPad via LiveFace.
Huge thank to Reallusion for organizing this contest, and to Octa.space/render for allowing me to render everything I needed during their current Beta! https://octa.space/
The final animation, I could render it in 4K with 150 GPUs at once thanks to Octa.render !!! https://octa.space/
I started with Camilla in CC4, sent to Zbrush using FaceTools, to customize design, expressions, and wrinkles. I finalized in Blender and photoshop for the painterly aspect.
Facial mocap is Live Face in iC8 with an iPad.
I sculpted the body in 3DCoat, from the CC4 body mesh, to be able to trasnfer skinning in the end. The body mocap is done in Mocap Fusion, with only 3 vive trackers, and finger tracking from the Quest pro.
https://www.mocapfusion.com/
Here is a link to the Reallusion Contest page:
https://rebrand.ly/t3m5s6o
Body surfacing is done in Substance Painter.
Her hair is made with hair Tool addon: https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/hairtool
Work in progress video, showing small bits from the whole process !
