Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
Every Thursday, I get together with a group of friends, both hobbyists and pros, for a "Speed Sculpt" session. This week's theme was "Ninja Turtles". I might have gone a bit overboard with what supposed to be a simply weekly sculpting challenge.
The final result of a short week of work, covering the entire pipeline : Character design and sculpting, retopology, texturing, environment modeling, and character animation, all the way to compositing and hand drawn grease pencil fort lining and FX.
The scene is fully optimized with looping background assets. The character is lowpoly running with a subdivision level of 1.
To maintain the in between 3d/2d aesthetic, traditional defocus wasn't an option. Instead, a fake mist pass and a glare were enough to make the character pop, finished with a light color correction.
The sculpt was created entirely in blender this time. Retopology was done 100% manually, keeping it as simple as possible. The normal map and hand painted textures do the heavy lifting to compensate for the low poly geometry.
Character texture were hand painted in Substance Painter. The rim lights, howere, are procedural. They use a diffuse as factor to tell the shader exactly where the light source is and its color, ensuring the rim light matches the scene's mood perfectly.
Initial blocking phase to find a balance between a relaxed (and cool) pose and dynamic action. The rig was created with AutoRig Pro.
Final animation polish, including facial expressions and secondary motion.
To create a seamless loop without it feeling too repetitive, I used an array for the environment while randomly placing specific props. The grease pencil outline are camera projected while all other line was drawn manually onto the mesh surface.