VAMPYR 3D Character Design Project

V A M P Y R has been a wild project. The idea of this character is something I´ve been working with for the last month. This vicious, sinister, agile and strong creature that patrolls the frozen nights in a winter distopic wasteland. Im quite proud of how this turned out, lets talk a little bit of how it has come to life.

Here you can see my Pureref board for this project. Here there are some explorations about this vampiric character. At first I wanted to portrait it fighting a werewolf but throughout iteration I started focussing only in the winged menace. The design was more intricate and complex and it trapped my whole attention.

I made the initial blockout in Blender. This is not my usual workflow, I normally start sculpting the creature on its last pose but this time I wanted to explore this option in order to use the simmetry and pose the character later on.

I sculpted the character in Shapelab VR. I completely love this software, I use it all the time. Being able to coexist with your piece in the same space is worthless. It just feels right. So after sculpting I had this 3,5M polys sculpture which was highly detailed and of course was quite heavy.

Then I turn on my Ipad to get the vampy on Nomad Sculpt because I wanted to try out reducing the topology there as it is a wonderfull sculpting tool. I was able to cuad remesh the sculpture loosing a lot of topology and getting an unwrapped clean cuad mesh of 400-500k cuads for the whole character.

After remeshing the sculpture it was time to texture it. For realistic PBR texturing I love to use Quixel Mixer. Its a great software, full of fantastic materials, and quite powerfull tools eventhough it stills on beta. I combined natural materials such as roots and clay, to make that rotten skin, and used personalized brushes to add the infected blood. I used a couple of UDIM tiles for the whole character.

I wanted the scene to feel alive and creepy. The main character was ready (rigging and weight management were quite painfull) but I needed more context. Thats why I went back to Shapelab and sculpted this little dead bunny. This one, sadly, was going to be the latest prey of the vampyr. In that upper image you can also see the maps I made for it in Krita (up), and the final maps I created on Quixel Mixer (down). Lastly you can also see some other assets as the infected blood brushes, the background trees image edit and the little snowflake for the particle system.

Finally I got to put it all together in this scene. I prepared some smoke, wind and vortex forces, snow particles, lighting, background environment and cameras. Lastly I render everthing and these are the final results in video format.

I trully hope you liked this project. Thank you for reading this and granting me a little bit of your time. You can reach to me at alexlechon12@gmail.com

Have a great one!

Sincerly, Alejandro.