Amphibious Girl

From concept to final product, I created this frog-like girl based on a painting idea I have for the future. While the main inspiration was based on the idea of a painting, the main goal in this project was to improve on my hand-painted texture skills and create a character of my own that fits in a specific modeling style.

Inspiration and References

Like previously mentioned, the main inspiration started with an idea for a painting I have in the future. My painting style is highly inspired by the Art Nouveau style, typically painted on a wood panel to keep a natural feeling, rather than on the typically choice of canvas. This idea then turned into making a character and small environment that would fit into a game, more specifically, Palia, which is a fantasy open world video game by Singularity 6.

For the modeling references, several artists' Artstation pages, Palia has shown off alot of the characters in the game before the full release, including the high sculpt of the base female model. This is where I got heavy inspiration in terms of the stylized realistic characters.

Included below is some realistic reference based off the American Bullfrog (female) and various tree frogs. Specifically with the female bull frogs, I took into account for their whiter bellies and larger anatomical features, such as the eardrums being near eyeball size. The rib cage section was also enlarged to match proportions of having a larger upper body and long thin, but muscular legs.

I then went to create anatomy drawings and final pose concepts for the character. I wanted to push myself and make a character that wasn't just a human female but a "amphibious girl" instead. So I added subtle features such as webbed hands and a larger rib cage.

Left is before reference research, right after reference research.

After the first drawings in scene and some critique, it was decided to make a more in nature pose rather than the heavy focus on the character in a simple background. The left image started with high saturated colors, but then I tested the values out without color and felt that the character was flat in tone, so I lowered the saturation of the environment and kept the character bright.

Modeling

The modeling stage had a few phases; high sculpt, retopology, UVs, final posing. I had an original idea to make a realistic female character for this project but later decided on the stylized version, thus I started with a more realistic proportion model and worked with that to influence the new model.

After the body, I started on the hair, which was going to be sculpted from strips into one combined and cleaned up asset.

Below is a render of the wireframe

Below is the final t-pose model with textures

Hand-Painted Textures

My first test with the color concept in 3D was done through polypaint in Zbrush, I wanted to make sure that what I designed looked accurate to the original design.

When I brought the girl into Substance Painter, I mainly worked from the Base Color mode to focus on the colors and hue variations. I used a diffuse generator that highlights the sculpt nicely to start off the paint job, then enhanced with painting color gradients and variations. Below is the before and after of the paint job!

All assets got this treatment, below is the tree trunk with the same process. After, the roughness map was created with simple masks with minor adjustments and painting.

Posing and Unreal 5

Posing was done through Zbrush for major posing, Maya for minor fixes but also final placement of assets. In Unreal, the landscape was built and the grass was painted through foliage.

Since the piece is character focused, I made a summer inspired three-point lighting setup with some additional lights to give the outdoor open world feeling. With Post Process, I added a very subtle fog to lighten up the scene along with it feeling just a slight bit muggy in the air.

Thought it would be fun to add a sparkle effect so it wasn't just water movement in the scene, so here is the final video!