Kaira | Haritha Uppalapati

Final Renders

Concept

Kaira is 25 years old and comes from a family of gypsies. Her name means a child of light. She was born almost completely blind and trained by her father to see with her feet which is why she doesn't wear shoes and wraps her feet with cloth instead.. Her eyes are hazed over, but she can still see blurry blobs of color. She can feel the vibrations of the people moving around her and track them. Contrary to her appearance, she is deadly when provoked and a skilled spear fighter; however, she hates conflict and avoids it whenever possible.

Her family was murdered by extremely powerful people who were tracking her uncle who stole something important from them. She is currently running away from them, trying to find help in her distant aunt who lives in a desert village of the Middle East.

Her head tattoo is the family crest which symbolizes foreseeing the future, a skill that her ancestors used to be able to have. Her sun tattoo represents the meaning of her name. She carries one object from each of her family members. The dagger from her father, jade beads from her mother, necklace and pendant from her grandmother, and a carved elephant from her brother. She also carries a sack of coins.

Character Concept Turnaround Sheet

Character Reference Sheet

Anatomy

This was my first time using Zbrush, so it was a huge learning curve and definitely different from traditional modeling programs like Maya and Houdini. I appreciated the ability to focus on sculpting rather than topology until later. I learned a lot more about how the human anatomy works and different body types.

Sculpting came to me easily enough. I mostly used the Standard, HPolish, and Clay Build Up brushes. I did have some trouble with mesh curves and controlling the positioning of the curves. I eventually got better and also learned to make my own brushes and mesh brushes.

Hard surface modeling was especially different, but easier to use than traditional software when I understood and experimented more with Zmodeler. I really appreciated the automatic welding of points and lesser chance of overlapping geometry.

Look Development

I learned a lot more about how Substance Painter works through this project. In Zbrush, my high res model came up to be around 2 million polys. I learned how to bake the high res onto the low res model in Substance, keeping the details that the high res would have without all of the polys.

I UVed everything in Zbrush and grouped objects in a certain way to create color ID maps. I didn't know about color ID maps before and found them to be extremely helpful in keeping the texture sets used on a character to only 5 -10 rather than many separate ones for each texture.

I used Marmoset Toolbag to render and imported texture, roughness, metallic, and normal maps to create the final look of the character. Marmoset was also amazing due to its real time rendering technology.