2025
ROLE
Lead Character Artist
TIMELINE
2025
TOOLS
Blender, ZBrush, Substance Painter
DELIVERABLE
Animated Short Film
At Creele Animation Studios, our mission for Sopo was to produce a flagship African animated short film tailored for major broadcast TV. From the outset, we rejected generic, off-the-shelf character templates. We wanted every character to feel authentically African, visually distinct, and polished to international production standards.
As the Lead Character and Surfacing Artist, I was responsible for 13 of the film’s 15 characters. My mandate was to take 2D concept art and build a unified 3D character pipeline, spanning initial style exploration in ZBrush all the way to final LookDev and test renders.
The character pipeline began with 2D concepts created by our concept artist, Charisma. Translating 2D artwork into 3D requires more than just tracing shapes; it requires interpreting volume, weight, and personality in three dimensions.
Style Exploration: I used ZBrush to run early style passes, establishing key proportions, facial structures, and silhouette balance before committing to final forms.
Anatomy & Features: We intentionally sculpted features that highlighted diverse African facial structures, ensuring each character had a distinct identity.
Attire & Accessories: Once the base bodies were approved, I sculpted the clothing, drapery, and character-specific props, maintaining clean form language across all 13 models.
After completing the high-poly sculpts, I prepped the topology and edge flow to hand off to Creele's rigging team. Once rigged, the assets came back to my desk for the grooming phase.
Hair is a defining element of African identity, and we refused to use generic hair setups.
Tailored Hair Systems: I developed a custom grooming approach for each character, accounting for natural afro-textured hair patterns, braids, coils, and distinct stylistic shapes.
Pipeline Efficiency: Every groom had to be optimized for animation movement while preserving volume and rich tactile detail under production lighting.
The texturing and shading phase was where the visual identity of sopo came together.
The Signature Eye System: One of the most critical elements we developed at Creele was our studio-specific eye design. Concept artist Charisma and I co-championed this initiative, designing a custom eye shader and iris structure that gave our characters an iconic, expressive look on screen.
Character Skin Shading: I built custom subsurface scattering (SSS) shader networks tailored for diverse skin tones. This gave the skin natural depth, warmth, and subtle light transmission without looking waxy or flat.
To complete the character pipeline, I set up master LookDev scenes to evaluate how materials, hair grooms, and skin shaders reacted under different lighting conditions.
I executed turntable renders and lighting test passes for all 13 characters, ensuring full visual consistency across the entire cast before handing the assets off to the animation and lighting departments.
