Zal is my Dungeons and Dragons player character that I created as a full 3D model in Blender. I also used him as an opportunity to brush up on my animation and compositing skills.

The Model

His high poly sculpt, as well as the final version of the lantern he carries. For his animation ready model, I made a version with fewer vertices and cleaner geometry then used blender’s normal bake feature in the rendering options to bake a normal map of his sculpt on to the material of the final model. This was later combined with a procedurally generated scaly skin material to create his final normal map. The scaly skin was also used as a diffusion and a roughness texture in his initial material. I simplified it later by baking the roughness, diffusion, and normals from the initial material into three separate 4k textures.

This is a shot of his final T-pose. His eyes look glassier than the above image because they are made up of two different spheres: one with the actual color of his eye, and a slightly larger, transparent sphere to act like the lens or anterior chamber, similar to the anatomy of a cat’s eye. The material preview of Blender doesn’t do well with transparency, however, hence the discoloration.

Zal’s rig was made using Blender’s Rigify add-on, with heavy adjustments to the face of the humanoid meta rig because of proportional differences.

Animations

I made various animations and render poses with Zal, the best three are shown below.

An idle, nighttime animation. HDRI of the galaxy is from ambientCG. This also has the first iteration of the lantern, which would be completely remade after this animation.

Quick series of facial expressions. The video does work when clicked on, but the YouTube thumbnail occasionally doesn’t load for reasons I don’t know.

Short jumping animation. Background assets (the building, the foliage, and the textures for the castle wall) were made by Quaternius on itch.io. The HDRI used here for the lighting came from Polyhaven.

This final image was made with much the same assets as the animation above. The only difference is the HDRI is a different one from Polyhaven (Kloppenheim 02). I ran the HDRI image texture through a color ramp in the world’s material editor to create those darker, more saturated blues and purples. Then I added some extra lights to further illuminate Zal and the castle wall behind him.