Spider-Gwen

Hello!
Toon-Shaded (NPR) Spider-Gwen based on Marvel's Spider-Gwen

I wanted to wrap my head around toon-shading in Unreal, and to build my own shader and workflow around it.
The goal was to break-down and recreate an aesthetic that could sit comfortably next to Zenless Zone Zero - which looks incredible - but without doing normal manipulation, instead by relying on strong sculptural shapes.

To achieve this, I custom-build all of the elements that would compose the shader and test-proof it on a character. At first I built an Unreal shader recomposing the different elements on light, shadow and reflections on simpler and cuter Pokemon I made, then layered them together, using texture and masks to drive the shader more artistically.

There is a ton of cool resources online that helped me get started, notably the Hoyoverse Honkai Impact 3rd talk. After a lot of experimentation I managed to build a little bit of everything I needed, and I started standardizing some processes and workflows and worked on Spider-Gwen.

The model was all sculpted in Zbrush, and the hair done in Blender, textures done in Painter and Matcaps painted in Clip Studio Paint

I'll do a tech breakdown in a future post!