The Portal

Over the past year I have ben involved with "The Bleacher Report", a show for ESPN that is on YouTube. In particular, I have been doing look development for the shows animated series called "The Portal".

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I took a different approach to the look this season, given a little more time to development the look that can be applied to all of the characters.

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I got research on the Plastic look of Toys, like the ones above.. and from That I started to work in Maya and Vray as well as Mudbox. We did not want to use Sub surface scattering like last season.

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One thing I did was Blend between two of the same shaders ( same Diff spec etc.. ). On the second shader I made very metallic

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Below you can see the Spec pass

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Blending between the two - using a roughness map I made in Painter .. gave a nice shimmer to the skin... making it "Plastic Like" but not too much

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Here is a wide of Rodman - the spec alone has a cool look

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Hello Micro Detail !!

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Another thing I did was make sure the plastic style skin was really in there in terms of detail.. The Displacement map in Maya was really reserved for the displacement maps that give the check and jaw shape and other muscular features.. So this meant that the normal had to really be convincing. I ended up getting great source spec maps and displacement maps from substances source, converting them to the udim set - Then taking the obj of the player, bringing it into Mudbox and turning up the sub d's and applying the plastic displacement maps to the model .Once baked in I would export that HUGE .obj and use that inside Substance Painter for the Hi rez bake for the shader normals.

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the detail is really there - as you can see in the normal map channel above.. .

You can see on the arms the detail as well

I would run the models through Substance designer and extra id's and other materials I can use inside Substance Painter... The other thing was I would make presets and other characters would role through easier ... ( sometimes !! there are always hooks .. .)

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I also did this same procedure for the Clothing - Giving them a unified and detailed look .. To fast track I would also run the Uniforms through Adobe Stager - then giving a link of the material to the director.

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