Tips & Methods to Make 3D Model of Arcane's Mel Medarda

Introduction 

Hello! My name is Larisa Kolori (Kolpina-Kukushkina). I am a 3D character and concept artist for games and animation. Actually, I've been drawing and concepting characters for as long as I can remember. For several years, I worked as an architect (my education specialty), making concepts and projects for buildings and interiors, but over time, I realized that I could prove myself and have more fun in the gamedev and animation industry and that working with characters was more my thing.

Fortunately, working as an architect helped me improve not only my drawing, concepting, composition, and color-scripting skills but also my work with 3D programs. I began making original characters for various artists, working with print studios, participating in many contests, such as those by ArtStation, ZugZug, Skills Up, and sometimes just making fanart for fun. One of my last big projects was working for the Blinkmoon Games studio, where I made several characters for the Necromantic project.

Queen Mel Medarda

I dearly love the artistic style of Arcane (the work of all the teams on this project is just awesome!), and just then, Roman Busels (ZugZug studio) was holding a contest on this topic,  so I thought, “Why not?”

You'll be surprised, but at first, I planned to make my own OC character in the Arcane style for the contest (it was a way to force myself to do my own project, which I dreamed about but, unfortunately, never got around to because of the constant workload at my main job as character modeler). I actually did my OC for a month, but halfway through the deadline, I realized that a character from the LOL universe, already familiar to everyone, would get a greater response from people for this contest. Plus, by that time, I had finally finished watching Arcane and was once again incredibly inspired by its characters. And although the deadline was already pressing, I decided to choose Mel.

I chose Mel Medarda for the challenge because I really love her storyline and her design, so I wanted to portray her in the picture of Queen Mel and also design and model a complex royal costume that would fit her and reflect her background (and the culture and design code from the series). The first idea was to make Mel in Ambessa’s role, in her armor – well, you know, a symbol of the fact that Mel, according to one of the options for the further plot, takes all the reins and the title of her mother, responsibility for her people. You must admit it’s a difficult choice for the concept, but it is such an interesting challenge and a symbolic one.

Of course, the first thing I did was collect a bunch of references. I tried to find all the concepts of Mel and Ambessa that were included and not in the production and try to unravel their design code, what the creators of Arcane tried to convey and tell us through their concept (costume and appearance) to also follow this key embedded in the characters. After all, in my work, I wanted to reveal and show myself as a good concept artist and modeler, as well as learn new tricks in these areas.

You couldn't just put on Ambessa’s costume on Mel, it would have looked incorrect. Ambessa has her own concept techniques (the heaviness of the masses, the feeling of an impenetrable wall, the color accent goes to the muscular arms with a red ribbon), and Mel is a more elegant, graceful character, she is more of a magician than a military woman with brute force.

Therefore, her concept should have been more focused on her golden tattoos (as a symbol of her revealed magical abilities), and the light, color, and conceptual accent should have gone to the area of ​​the clavicle and face. However, the two of them, Mel and Ambessa, should still be united by common techniques, as natives of the same land and blood, like mother and daughter: weaving techniques from their homeplace, the tattoo patterns themselves, braided legs, large volumes of curves of the navels, earrings, general impression of the stateliness and majesty. Plus, Mel, as already a Piltover advisor, also had to be imprinted with a kind of art deco style of a city dweller of the capital, which also had to be mixed with the ethnic design code of her native lands. This whole search for common but at the same time distinctive features of the costume for Mel you see on the image above.

Thus, the design of the concept itself was chosen in such a way that the lines of Mel’s costume (in the form of curving shoulder pads, a vertical strip of fabric to the floor, weaves on her arms and legs) just visually lead the viewer's gaze to the main dominant of the composition, the area of ​​the clavicle and head with tattoos.

As for the crown, it was conceived as a kind of replica of Ambessa's crown, but it is divided into two parts: from the early years of Ambessa’s reign (spiky edging) and her later years (a more predatory mask with scratches). However, it has to be a symbol that Mel has already put on one of the parts (the first, as a symbol of revealed abilities and acceptance of her true self, a symbol of acceptance of responsibility and the title), and she also seems to be pondering, leaves the viewer intrigued as to whether she is going to put on the second part of her mother's mask. She seems to be faced with a choice: to accept or not to finally accept the goals, views, and image of her mother.

Also, I deliberately chose an almost symmetrical composition from the character's front. This emphasizes the feeling of strength, the gravity of choice, and the illusion of a scale, and also best reveals the idea of ​​the costume.

Modeling

My entire pipeline for the model was made using ZBrush and Marmoset Toolbag. I'll say a few words about how I modeled the figure itself – I made it with a base mesh and then refined the resemblance based on the refsheets of a specific character.

Sometimes the face had to be left to "rest" for a couple of days so I could take a fresh look at the result again and polish it. But I will dwell on some, in my opinion, tricky details of sculpting in ZBrush. It’s about sculpting hair, tattoos, legs, and arms,

The retopology was planned to be done in Maya. However, the deadlines were already very tight (plus, there were other parallel projects at work), and it was decided to intentionally shorten the retopology block for this project in order to focus on the presentation, painting, posing, and staging of the scene. But I will be happy to show this block in my other work in the portfolio – wait for updates! 

I unwrapped this model and did UV maps in ZBrush to further transfer them to the Marmoset Toolbag scene.

Texturing

I hand-painted the model in ZBrush.

To understand how to paint individual thin tattoos on the body, you just need to imagine how light is distributed on spherical metal surfaces – the body is essentially a slightly complicated cylinder (try to find references of metal cylinders, vases, or even teapots, or just buy a teapot, or, for example, fill the model entirely with gold and see how the metal material behaves in a 3D program).

In general, analyze how the metal would be distributed over the total volume of the body. Then, just mentally select a piece of tattoo from the overall volume while maintaining the rules of light and shadow distribution. Also, compare your work with the references of the character itself and try to calculate how the light and reflexes conceived by the concept artist behave.

Also, to make your metal look more like metal in the Arcane style, highlight the edges of your gold tattoos with a mask. Paint them in a medium tone of gold (this technique will create a false thickness effect). Then, without removing the mask, look at where the bright highlights are distributed on the metal, and paint the masked edges in these places with a lighter tone, almost a highlight.

Also, if you are making a game-ready character (for example, for axonometric views like LOL), your painting should be with a little deception: you should do the main lighting both in front and behind the character in order to create the illusion in painting that the light is falling from the viewer's side (in both cases when the character turns to us either with his face or his back).

Lighting

I'll tell you about some settings for materials and light in Marmoset. I wanted to achieve a more cinematic effect, so I decided to create the lighting effects using the fusion of Marmoset render and lighting hand-paint techniques (I selectively included some lighting techniques in the hand-paint of the golden shoulder pads, cloak, boots, arms, and legs, tattoos and of course the face).

So I tried to set up the contrast reflexes that are typical for Arcane in Marmoset. In Mel's case, the creators often made a bright orange contrast reflex for the scenes with her, which I tried to repeat with the help of additional colored direct lights in the scene to get closer to the Arcane series. 

I set up the light according to the classic rules. When you constructing a scene, you shouldn't overcomplicate the lighting. You should have exactly one main light (direct light), relative to which the main shadows are built, and the other lights should rather complement/subordinate to it: a sky light with a small brightness value (to make your falling shadows not completely black and contrasting), bright colored counter-reflex (the color and intensity depends on the character's color scheme and the desired mood), and a few side lights with very low brightness (literally for a little manual highlighting of some parts of the clothes drowned in the darkness, it is especially important to pay attention to it when your character is dressed almost entirely in black.)

Thus, if you take the full body of a character for your scene (and what you can notice on most 2D character concepts), the lightest and brightest places are usually distributed in the head and shoulders area, and then the general light seems to fade in a gradient towards the bottom of the figure, and in the leg area, it should already be almost dim, extinguished. Also, here are some metal parameters from Marmoset that I mixed with handpainted textures. So, after rendering the views in Marmoset, I simply composed them all in Photoshop.

Conclusion

I spent a month specifically on the concept and model of Mel (with all the distractions on side projects). The biggest challenge was to design her costume. Well, and probably to model her tattoos and hair. Overall, I learned a lot on this project, but at the same time I showed many of my strengths.

I advise aspiring artists to think and plan less and just start doing something, little by little, every day, and try and experiment. Small but constant steps in your favorite destination are much more important than great grandiose plans and endless speculations, which sometimes scare you off more than they help you develop in the desired direction. Sometimes just doing something helps you understand where you want to go.

Lora Kolori, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine