LogInRobin Mkrtchyan walked us through the Whale Airship Project based on concept art, which was modeled in Blender and textured in Substance 3D Painter, explaining the creation of the airship with a hard surface and the character featuring four distinct hair systems, each with its own unique look and feel.
Introduction
My name is Robin Mkrtchyan, and I'm a junior 3D Artist working at Blue Moon, specializing in 3D modeling and texturing. Four years ago, I picked up Blender just for fun, and I was immediately hooked. I began expanding my skill set by learning software like Substance 3D Painter, Maya, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Cinema4D, and more.
I studied Multimedia and Creative Technologies in college, where I learned the fundamentals of 3D and digital media. I refined my skills by practicing at home, experimenting with different techniques, working on personal projects, and learning from online resources. This combination helped me develop my own workflow and artistic style. Since then, I've worked professionally on video games, animations, VR/AR projects, product visuals, and more.
The Whale Airship Project
Whale Airship was originally a project that I created in 2022 based on Duy Van's concept art. I really liked this concept because it was a good mix of hard surface modeling and character creation. Back then, I was still pretty new to 3D, and while I was happy with the result, I knew I could push it much further one day.
When going through my portfolio at the start of 2025, this project stood out to me as something I could really improve with my current skills, so I decided to revisit it. My goal was to improve the technical aspects of the piece, like the model, textures, and sculpt, while still maintaining the original charm and feel.
Modeling
I started out with a blockout to make sure the proportions, overall shapes, and silhouettes were strong. This is an important step that I had skipped during my first attempt.
Once I was happy with that, I moved on to modeling the individual pieces. Instead of modeling each panel separately, I first modeled the ship's body as a single shape and then split it into panels.
Hard surface modeling is what I love doing most, so keeping the topology clean across the entire model was very important to me. Clean edge flow also helps with marking seams during the UVing process.
Character sculpting is not my strong suit, so the character was the most challenging part of this project for me. I used Blender to sculpt this character, and I find it great for simple, stylized sculpts. Afterward, I retopologized it with proper face loops so the face would be deformable in case I wanted to animate it and for a cleaner portfolio presentation.
Hair Systems
The character has four separate hair systems for the mustache, eyebrows, stubble beard, and jacket fur, each with its own distinct look and feel. I used Blender's hair system to create them, and this is definitely my favorite improvement over the old version.
UVs
I used a UDIM workflow for both the ship and the character to achieve sharper textures. The ship's UVs are divided into 3 UDIM tiles and the character's into 2. A consistent texel density between UDIMS was very important to ensure uniform scaling of textures like Grunge Maps during texturing. Blender's UV tools are, unfortunately, still very limited, so I use several add-ons like Texel Density Checker and UV Squares for better results.
Texturing and Shading
The textures were done in Substance 3D Painter using a PBR workflow. This is definitely one of my favorite steps of the process! I like stacking multiple Grunge Maps on top of each other and masking out where necessary for that weathered look.
For the character, I added subsurface scattering to the skin shader to give it a (semi-)realistic, Pixar-like look.
Lighting, Rendering, and Post-production
For lighting, I like to start with a 3-point lighting setup + an HDRI for ambient light and to help with reflections, then adjust and add lights as needed. The rendering was done using Blender's Cycles render engine.
For post-production, I kept it relatively light. Using the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop, I adjusted parameters like contrast and saturation and added effects such as vignetting, sharpening, and bloom to the brightest areas. Post-production is definitely something I want to improve on in the future.
Summary and Closing Thoughts
The original project took me about a week to complete in 2022. The rework surprisingly took me 2 to 3 weeks despite already having some base pieces from the original, due to the added complexity and refinements.
The biggest lesson I learned is the importance of iteration and trusting my own ideas. In 2022, I worked in a more linear way, whereas now I allow myself to experiment more and not follow the concept one to one.
My advice for beginning artists would be to keep revisiting your work and avoid stagnation. Improvement doesn't happen overnight, but looking at your old projects and reworking them can be a great way to track progress and push your skills further. Trust your ideas, and don't get discouraged. During the first three years of my 3D journey, I had very few eyes on my projects, but I kept going! That persistence is what eventually helped me improve and get where I am today.