INTRODUCTION 

This is an article I wrote for the Marmoset Toolbag website back in 2020. You can also check this breakdown at their website here.

I would like to show a little bit of my process and thoughts while baking maps, creating textures, with more emphasis on how I set up materials and lights in Marmoset for the Grumpy Goblin, a character based on the concept of the amazing Todd Ulrich.

This character was made in Marmoset Toolbag 3, before the release of Marmoset 4, therefore, there was no support for ray tracing  yet.
The main goal of this project was to test how far I could push the render quality in Marmoset and get a result as close as possible to an off-line renderer such as Arnold or V-Ray.

BAKING

Since my goals for the project were strictly to test render quality, I didn’t care about optimization at all for this character. So, as you can see on the image above, the “lowpoly” is still a quite dense mesh.

I broke down the character in 3 different texture sets in order to have good resolution across the whole model, one map for skin, one for all the leather and one for metals.

Also, I separated the character pieces in several different groups in a way where each piece didn’t touch each other. This prevents errors due to mesh overlap when baking. Each group have a High poly and a Low poly version with the correspondent same pieces, example:
• Leather01_high
• Leather01_low

• Leather02_high
• Leather02_low

Using the suffix “high” and “low” for each group will make your life easier when loading your meshes to bake, especially if you use the “Quick Loader” in the “Baker” component in Marmoset. 

Marmoset has been my software of preference for baking for the past  years. Tools like “Paint Offset” for adjusting the cage in real time and “Paint Skew” that helps to redirect parts of the projection, makes it quite easy to fix baking issues.

For this model I didn’t have much problems with the cage, but in tight areas like the transition from eyebrows to the nose, the default cage settings was causing some minor errors around the wrinkles. The “Paint Offset” tool was used to fix that area and some other spots as you can see in the gif above.

 I baked all the base maps necessary to start a Substance Painter Project except for the ID map. I usually use polypaint to create an ID map to make my life easier when texturing on Painter, but because pretty much all the bolts and even the stitches are actual mesh, I skipped that part since it would be easy to mask things out by selecting meshes or UV shells. 

TEXTURING

As I mentioned before, the emphasis on this breakdown is on the render side. But for me it is impossible to talk about the render without first approaching some key points of the texturing process.  

For me, texturing and rendering walks together. Don’t matter where you do your textures, it has to look good in the final piece, whatever it is in Marmoset, Arnold or in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. 

Usually my high poly meshes tend to be very clean, with not much fine details. I prefer to do the heavy detailing work with textures for 2 main reasons:

First, my high poly mesh and Zbrush file stays relatively light, so it keeps easier to model and I don’t need a super dense mesh to have enough details to bake it. Meshes with too much geo always causes me some headache when exporting the model for baking. If the mesh is too heavy I have to decimate it, that might be very time consuming and also due the possible amount of decimation, the mesh might lose some details. 

Second and most important, even already having in mind what I want for the final look of the character, I can experiment many different ways to achieve the visual I have imagined, trying different material combinations and seeing what works better, not only detail wise but also with the colors this time. 

When texturing, I like to progress the character texture as a whole, so instead of starting working on an area and making that specific spot looking awesome right away, I make an overall “first pass texture” on the entire model that will help to give me a better idea of what I want. 

As soon as I finish the first pass, even if it is very rough, I like to export the textures and start testing how it looks in the target render engine. Since the goal for this project was to test render possibilities, I brought everything to Marmoset as soon as possible, this gives me a more clear idea of what the end result will be. So from this moment and beyond, I set up a scene that will start to be my main reference for the rest of the project, every change I make  when texturing has to serve the purpose of making that scene look good. This scene is just a base, doesn’t have the final lights and settings, I will talk about that later.

Once my base scene in Marmoset was set, I started the second texture pass breaking up the base texture with some more detail like the other side of the leather, some damage to the armor, more colors to the face and so on.

For the first and second pass, I check the character in the Marmoset scene, but not so often. As the texturing advances and it gets closer and closer to the final result, the back and forth between Substance Painter and Marmoset happens way more frequently, especially when working on the skin. 

For the face, I wanted this rough look on his skin. The face of an old goblin who stayed too much time in the sun during his glorious days of war. With the SSS in Marmoset the skin was looking too soft and not giving the feeling I wanted for the character.

So after a certain point I took the skin normal map, exported it to Photoshop, duplicated the texture several times and used the “Overlay” layer effect on each of the duplicated layers to make the normal map look way stronger. With the SSS in Marmoset the skin was looking too soft and not giving the feeling I wanted for the character.

I also created a Parallax Map to help to increase the illusion of volume on the face. This helped to pop some of the skin details. I will talk more about that in the render section.

One thing that will help to add a lot of depth illusion to the final product, is to fake shadows  in the texture. For most of my characters, I put a layer on top of everything that I call “Overall Occlusion”. This is a “Fill Layer” with a dark diffuse color masked with a “Fill” node where I hook the occlusion map and on top of that goes a “Invert” filter.

In some cases as you can see in the stitches around the  patch, even with that information being in the bake, I manually paint some occlusion and some height information to add more depth to that specific area. 

This type of tricks will help your textures to keep it’s volumes, even when there is a strong light hitting that area. 

MATERIALS SETUP, LIGHTS AND CAMERAS

Since I started modeling this guy, I imagined him as someone who has dedicated his whole life to the military services and now is just an old soul who is still part of the army, but don’t wanna be bothered by anybody. 

This kind of small “description” always helps me to know what I want for the final shot. In this case, I wanted to recreate the feeling of those old photos from the early 1900’s, so I searched for some photos to use as reference for camera angle and lighting.

Before we dive into lights and cameras, let's take a quick look at the materials setup.

For every personal project I do, I work with the Specular Gloss PBR shader pipeline. I prefer to use it since it gives me some artistic freedom compared to the Metal Roughness pipeline. 

For example, I can have the purple in the Albedo channel for the Goblin’s skin and set a slightly blue specular to break up a little bit the boredom of the dominant purple color. The difference is very subtle since the saturation of the blue has to be very low, but it makes a good difference compared to the Metal Roughness pipeline where the specular would be white or in case of metals it would have the same color as the Albedo. This can be very  powerful when working with hair or putting some  makeup on your character.

As you can see in the image above, for the metal material I only used Normal, Albedo, Specular and Gloss maps,   for the leather in addition to those I set some Sub Surface Scattering and Translucency  only using the material parameters with no maps. 

For the skin, I did set the SSS and Translucency in the same way as the leather, only using material parameters with no Maps. Because it is a material exclusively for the skin, the SSS should be everywhere and about the Translucency, Marmoset does a pretty good job detecting how deep the light should penetrate your model depending on your settings. These parameter values will always vary according to your scene settings and model scale.

As I mentioned before, I added a Parallax Map to the skin Material. It helps to create a more realistic sense of depth to the skin since this map will take care of occlude the cavities that shouldn’t be seen from certain angles, this effect is called Parallax Occlusion.

As you can see in the video above, when turned on, it looks like the mesh received an “inflate”, but in fact this is only the height map controlling what pixels should be seen and which ones should be hidden based on the angle of the camera. If you pay attention, the silhouette of the mesh doesn’t change.

Look at the rotating images on the side, on the top window where the Parallax map is on, pay attention to the middle wrinkle in the lower lip and see the cavity of that wrinkle “disappearing”, in fact being occluded as the model rotates. On the bottom window, where the Parallax map is off, you can see that all the cavities keep visible until they rotate 90º away from the camera.   

Take a look at this video of a single plane rotating with a Parallax map. You can also learn more about Parallax here.

When setting up a scene, the very first things I do is: 

• Set a key light that represents the feeling I want for the final shot. A very high light generating lots of shadows? A light that comes from the center making the character very bright? This may vary a lot from project to project, but I like to  keep things simple when I start.

• Set up my Main Camera position  and field of view and LOCK it. In this case I set my main camera to 60mm, but as you can see, my scene has multiple cameras for different situations. I always do my adjustments in other cameras than the main one, this helps me to keep a consistent comparison for every time I make a new render test.

• Put the character in a Turntable, so even from the locked Main Camera I can see how the character interacts with the lights from different angles.

• Turn Global Illumination on, and adjust its brightness in a way that will not kill my shadows. It’s pretty common for me to be tweaking the lights, trying to cast some interesting shadows, but the brightness value of GI is so high that I would never get the visual I’m looking for. So yeah, always check that when you start.

The light setup for this scene was fairly simple. I used 4 spot lights, 2 in the front (key and Fill light) and 2 in the back for Rim Light. 

I wanted the lights to bring more of the grumpy feeling of the character without making him look evil or scary,  so although my key light projects lots of shadows, I used the fill light to bring some balance to the composition.

I think it is part of my render style to use very strong back lights, I like the effect that the rim light brings to the composition. For this scene in particular I bumped up the bloom effect a little bit as well to bring the feeling of his old glorious days of war. So at the end the idea was to have this mix of a photo that could be radiant, but he is so grumpy that he just wanted this “photo thing” to end quickly, he is not enjoying it at all!

One important thing to know when setting up your Spotlight is that you can and you should adjust its Shape Width. This will define how soft or sharp your shadows will be. The default settings for Marmoset Spotlight will give you very sharp shadows. In real life shadows will hardly be that sharp, especially when talking about the skin that has so much scattering.

Areas like the neck, a big “cylindrical” shape, where there is no object occluding the light should have a nice smooth lighting transition. But areas where there is something close to the surface blocking the light should be a little bit sharper, like the casted shadow from the hat to the head. You can make a test putting your hand over your desk and slowly raising it, you gonna notice that the farther your hand gets from the desk, blurrier the shadow gets. 

Note that making the Spotlight shape width too big, can kill your shadows as well, so be careful when adjusting these values. 

Even the character being stylized I wanted to break that “pure digital” rendering look and bring some realism to the final shot. Having that in mind I added some Depth of Field, Grain and Vignette to the camera. These few things will help to ground your render to reality. 

In the real world, cameras with lenses set for close up shots will naturally have a focal point that will remain sharp in the photo while everything else will be somewhat blurry. If you have an image that is completely sharp, it will look fake. Not even our eyes can focus on everything around us, why should your digital camera do? 

Real cameras produce some imperfections to pictures such as grain. This is way more noticeable in analog cameras,  but is also common even to modern digital cameras, especially in low luminosity conditions. 

Vignette is not something common to every lens, but it definitely happens in the real world. I decided to add it because I thought not only it helped to bring more mood to the image but also some nice color variation to the background. 

I really recommend this article by Darren Thomas giving some tips about how to improve your render. 

CONCLUSION

Marmoset is an extremely powerful tool that can provide top quality works! The fact that it is a real time render engine makes it really easy to set things up and test everything on the fly, so I’m constantly trying new things. Now, with Marmoset 4 it is even better!! 

Thank you so much for reading this article! I know it was pretty long, but I truly hope it was helpful enough and you have learned something!

So, here we go!

Currently, I'm working on 2 personal projects in my spare time; they are totally different from each other. I'm gonna talk about the one that I started first, Ellie and Hagan.

This post ended up being very long because I'm covering several steps of the process. I promise the next one will be shorter! x]

This will be a full project, concept, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation and maybe VFX.

My concept art skills are not that great, so I have been trying to improve them by exercising my creativity, painting skills, and workflow. I would like to translate not only other people's concepts into 3D but also my own characters. 

I really hope this can inspire 3D artists like me, who struggle a bit with their own concepts, as well as new students who want to join the game industry.

After the Art War 2 contest, hosted by Cubebrush, I felt the need to do more concepts for practicing, since I was struggling a little bit to make my own character design and finish this guy here:

Having that in mind, I decided to start a new project, aiming for a hand-painted style like League of Legends.  

I knew I wanted to make a character with exaggerated proportions, carrying something on his back, a character that could look strong, but also cute or Innocent somehow, something that I could feel that was unique. I started with some very simple and rough silhouette sketches, until one of them call my attention, reminding me a turtle... So that was it!!! A turtle it would be!!!

After a certain time working around the idea, this was the evolution of the process:

The idea was to get better shapes, but I still felt that it was too basic and not unique at all, so I started to search for more references that could give me some ideas.

In the middle of my search, I did remember the Cosmic Turtle, a Hindu myth that tells that the world is carried by a giant turtle with 4 elephants on its back. The myth seems to vary a lot, but one of its versions is something like this:

  (yes, the Earth is flat in this myth! xD)

So I decided to make something inspired by this myth, and that is how Ellie, the little elephant princess was born! I started the sketches doing a male elephant, but I decided to change to a female later.

Ellie is currently worthy of an Ancient gemstone (I still need to come up with a name for it) that gives infinite power to its holder and guides the destiny of Hagan, the eternal guardian of the stones and their holders. Although Hagan is an immortal being, the holders are not, and every time that they perish, the current gemstone will break, and a new one will be "born," waiting for the next worthy holder.

Back to the concept process, I started some new sketches trying to give some quick shapes to my thoughts, BUT this is the tough part for me, taking things from my head and putting it into a 2D draw is something kinda hard for me, I can totally visualize it on 3D but on 2D I struggle a lot because of lack of practice. I can totally replicate a drawing looking and doing it by my own, but create something from scratch is waaaay harder, that is why I found myself on 3D I guess, because I could just translate something that was already done by other concept artist.

Anyway, after a certain time this is what I got:

I felt that I was not able to represent my thoughts in these sketches, but this whole process, although a little bit frustrating, was very good to give me a North. I realized that I was getting away from what I first had in my mind for the turtle, which was something closer to a sea turtle (like the 3rd drawing of the first sketches), but I was doing something closer to a tortoise. If you look at sea turtles from the side view, they have a very "flat" body compared to other turtles and especially tortoises, with very long and flat arms, and representing those characteristics on a biped turtle from a 3/4 point of view in a 2d drawing was very tricky for me.

So, I decided to jump into ZBrush, knowing that I would "discard" the previous visual concepts BUT keep the essence of the character idea.

I spent 20 minutes doing a quick blocking and it was enough to see that definitely that was something that I didn't want to. I didn't want to make the classic humpback biped turtle, looking old and slow, you can find dozens of this on ArtStation if you look for turtles. No, I wanted to make it look strong and wise, a great guardian, something unique like the ones from Mickael Lelièvre, but with my style!! So, after a little bit of back and forth, this was what I got:

For Ellie, I was planning something cute but elegant, happy and agitated, something that could contrast with Hagan. Unlike the turtle, I didn't spend much time on the elephant's body but on its head. It was tricky to find a sweet spot that could match the style I wanted.

I decided to start modelling a more realistic elephant head to understand the basic shapes, and from this point, I started stylizing it.

For style reference, it didn't take much to find out that people don't model much cute elephants. Most of my cartoony elephant references was from Zootopia or Dumbo,  but even I loving the Disney style, that was not exactly what I wanted for this project, also it wouldn't match the League of Legends style. Since the Cosmic Turtle is a Hindu myth, I wanted a face that could somehow remind Ganesha, the elephant God. 

I still gonna improve the head/face shapes, but for the blocking phase, this is more than enough to give me the vision of the character.

As I said before, the body was way easier, heavily inspired by Zootopia elephants, I kept some key elements that helped to give the feeling of an elephant body and not only a human body with an elephant head. This is the result of the whole-body blocking:

For clothes and accessories, I already had in mind what I wanted; it was just a matter of trying to combine some of these ideas.

With this Hindu look, Ellie would be a cute and happy princess. Hagan would also be inspired by Hindu culture, but he would be like a strong and wise "monk" who could travel for long distances with great endurance. The turtle would be carrying the elephant in a rustic Jempana, a type of wooden litter.

This are some of the references:

I tested 6 to 7 different initial clothes/assets, but I just discarded most of them, so I can't show them here. However, they were all based on the same ideas.

Since the final product should be a "League of Legends character", I was constantly paying attention to ALL points of view of the character, especially the top view. It will need to have a good reading from a far distance, so I avoided small details that wouldn't add much to the character. Also, is important to say that I used the Hindu culture as inspiration, but I didn't want to be exactly the same, it should be sut

This is part of the process and decisions made for the props.

Before moving on with the character and assets, I wanted to make sure that it would be possible to move the turtle's head with its horns in contact with those 2 big logs. I had an idea of how it would work, but even with that, I decided to make a quick rigging for testing to prevent me from future frustrations.

After this step, I wanted to assurance that the things I had on my mind for detailing and colour would work, so I made a quick pose inside the ZBrush and went back to Photoshop for some paint over, finalizing the concept.

At the end of the paint-over, I decided to take a screenshot from the League of Legends maps and put the characters over it to check if everything was working as it should be.

So, that is it!! I'm pretty happy with the result so far, and I'm looking forward to continuing with the project.

I am still probably gonna change one thing or another, and for sure, I gonna add a little bit more detail and refinement, but this is gonna be all on the high poly model.

I hope you have enjoyed it so far. Any critiques or commentaries are more than welcome. I really appreciate any feedback, even about the step-by-step text! 

Thank you very very much for your patience and time!!