Xiao Hulu
Xiao Hulu is a cute boy from China. I modeled and
textured him using Maya and Zbrush. He was
created for my Character Look Development course.
It really helped me a lot. I learned how to develop
my ideas into a visual texture. I was able to finish
my character Xiao Hulu at the end of the quarter.
I am really happy about it.
Design Process
The concept was from my old comic. I created him when I was in high school. It was about a boy who was very naughty. One day, he heard his parents talking with a doctor about his illness. His parents are very heartbroken. He became sad and afraid. He told his friends about it but none of them would help. He ends up stealing a book about his illness's antidote and goes on a journey to find it.
Story
Name: Xiao Hulu (When he was born, he laughed when he would look at a gourd.)
Age: 10
Skin: very little yellowish, with blush on the cheeks
Eyes: brown ( with a little violet)
The story happens in Qing Dynasty of China. Xiao Hulu went to a journey in order to find a special plant, to cure his illness.
In the end he figures out his illness was a lie. His master and his mother lied to him in order to help him grow up. He actu-
ally learns a lot from his unexpected journey.
Character Design
Modeling
Most of my model was created by using Maya and Zbrush.
Texture and Render
Eyes
I wanted to make Xiao Hulu’s eyes a mix of real human eyes and a cartoony eye style.
For the iris, I chose simple textures similar to real human eyes. I used a basic map of the eye and began to paint on it. Xiao Hulu is a Chinese boy. so I chose brown as basic color. I wanted to make it more dramatic, so I put a little bit of violet into it. Then I converted the color into a bump map. For the eyeball, I created a surface shape. Without UV mapping, I use a 2d ramp map in the transparent layer on a blinn shader. For the color map, I used another blinn with ramp map in the color layer to get the map. Then I painted in Photoshop.
Skin
I played with the shader for a long time in Maya in order to get the basic color of different layers: subdermal, epidermal and back scatter. Later, I drew all the maps for skin in zbrush. The maps are color map, normal map, displacement map and specular map. When I put different maps in Maya, I noticed that the maps on SSS shader were not visable. So later, I tried different methods to fix the problem.
After the first try of SSS Shader, I started to play with the other shaders. I also created another map special for back scatter. I also creaed map special for Back scatterput and my color map in the Diffuse layer. There are the tests from Maya mental ray:
Accessories
Cloth
