This is Zua. A digital influencer from South Korea I had the pleasure of creating.

For this project I was in charge of the creation of the entire character. Using Zbrush mainly but also Substance Painter, Maya and Photoshop.

The team leader of our small group of dedicated 3D artists, Rui:
https://www.behance.net/rfvisuals
https://www.rfvisuals.com/

In charge of everything Houdini, in this project mainly the hair, Justin:
https://www.behance.net/justinkantor
https://www.jlkantor.com/

Some early on pipeline advice and suggestions by the incredibly talented character artist and dear friend, Aleksandr Kirilenko:
https://www.artstation.com/aleks_kirilenko

I was the Unreal Engine expert on the team. In charge of creating Zua as a video game character for real time performances. For this I created the entire character. Because of Unreal Engine performance requirements I created a different version of the Hair in Xgen and a skin shader based on the Epic Games Metahuman skin shader, with my own textures plugged in. Everything part of the Unreal Engine shots are made by me. Body, hair, textures, shading, animation, lighting, photography, clothing, blueprint setup… I really learned a whole lot on this project.

I was lucky enough to be in charge of her showcase in Unreal Engine. So I created a scene to present her. This is the first time I’m making a video inside of Unreal Engine, which is really fun! I am very surprised by the quality of the Unreal Engine renderer. It’s possible to get good depth of field and motion blur now.

We wanted some more artistic shots for her as well so I had fun making a portrait photoshoot style of image with her surrounded by plants, found in the megascans library.

One of the things we did is develop the idea of her coming out of the Metaverse, through a portal, into the real world. We decided at the time to use the, now controversial, Midjourney AI system. Back then I wasn’t aware of the art theft aspect of AI datasets. I used around 50 images and collaged everything together in Photoshop. The character outfit is designed by me and she is rendered fully in 3D. The background is made with the help of Midjourney. I want to make it clear that even though we used AI, there still went a lot of work into this image and I’m very happy with the result. That’s why I feel it’s alright, with a big disclaimer, to showcase this image. Of course, I do not condone art theft and I hope in the future AI can be used more ethically and with respect to the owners and creators of the images used in the datasets.

The biggest task of this project was sculpting the head. The goal is to make her attractive but still realistic. She is hand sculpted from scratch and not based on any real person. The references and inspirations were a mixture of multiple people. This was one of the biggest challenges for me as a character artist. I hope I managed to give her character and appeal, while still feeling relatable.

For this project I also did lots of faceswaps in Photoshop. The images are mostly pictures from real life but I swapped the model her head with our 3D head of Zua. These are some results.

More of this on Zua her Instagram page.

You can follow Zua on her Instagram page:
https://www.instagram.com/im_zua/

More to follow later…