Doctor Fate -Development-

My current personal project is to make a CG version of comic book/DC Universe character Doctor Fate. He appears in many different designs over the years, spanning back to 1940, which allowed me some creative freedom to create the look I wanted, yet still stay true to what makes the character. As far as I can see on the web no one has ever made a high quality CG version of the character. I started by collecting a lot of reference images of him and researching the character, I'm not a massive comic book guy, I just like the character design so much I decided to do this.

My first step was to build basic geo of the character and create the base mesh in a generic pose.

After laying out the UV's is UV layout, using 2 x 4k patches for this project I started to add a detailed sculpt to parts of the geometry, starting with the body/suit. 

I tested out some cloth simulations for the cape, but eventually came back to z-brush to do a sculpt of it so I could get the look I wanted. My goal is to create a CG still for this project, so a high res non animated cape is fine.

Bringing back a medium/high res decimated mesh into Maya allows the possibility of not using displacement and gives more control of the final look. I used UV transfer to move the UV layouts I did on base mesh over to the high detail decimated mesh.  

Now I switched to Mari 1.5 to create colour, spec, dirt, bump and normal maps for the character. Seeing as the characters history comes from Egypt, I weaned to give the gold detail that reflects that ancient Egyptian style. 

High res clay render of Dr Fate. I wanted his main suit to resemble more of the material batman/spiderman have on their suit, as it makes it look very strong.

More texture work in Mari.

Textures complete!

Render set up in 3Ds Max/V-Ray. Using a key light, dome light, GI, and a further light at each hand and each eye. A HDRI was used for soft reflections.