The Character Creator "Digital Human Contest 2020" has come to a close after 2.5 months of an exciting competition. With the participation of dozens of amazing artists / animators, Character Creator has proven once again to be the tool of choice among all skill levels and project missions.
The "Digital Human Contest 2020" was a runaway success that comprised of 168 submissions, with more creativity and skill in a single contest than we have ever witnessed. A huge thanks goes out to all the participants who rocked this event! Join us and check out the winners for Realistic, Stylized, Animated character categories, including special awards for Digital Doubles, iClone Animation, and Student Artworks.
Testimonial - Rafael Benedicto
It's been a great honor to be part of this contest, and I give my thanks to Reallusion and to everyone who supported me through this entire process. Character Creator helped a lot in this project, as I was able to build and iterate an anatomically-accurate human in just minutes, then spend more time on other things like her outfit and equipment. And the results speak for themselves. Once again, thank you!
Judge's Comments
At first glance, the character setting caught our eyes and it’s incredible that Rafael could perfectly realize the sketch to 3D. The work in progress showed how Rafael patiently sculpted stunning details on the suit, wings and weapon in ZBrush, and how he best utilized high-resolution skin textures from Character Creator for final rendering in Vray. Character Creator’s SkinGen tool and Facial Editor tool gave him lots of help on facial details and expressions. It’s great to see how Rafael incorporated Character Creator into his favorite tools like ZBrush, Substance Painter, 3ds Max and Vray.
Winner Prizes:
- Cash Prize: US $2,000
- Sponsor Prize: Perception Neuron PRO
- Sponsor Prize: Faceware Realtime for iClone
SECOND PRIZE
Miguel Soudjay, 3D Artist
Testimonial - Miguel Soudjay
It was a whole new way of creating for me. Character Creator 3 is a tool that blends perfectly with other software and makes it an undeniable asset in the creation of characters like the Cyber Boxer. The topology is flexible and you have the possibility to have a rigged character to do your poses and animations. Working with a good base makes it possible to go further and this is the Reallusion proposal with Character Creator 3.
Cyber Boxer is a character that embodies hope and determination all sprinkled with class. Future technology will allow everyone to become stronger. Accidents will no longer be a burden. This was my second realistic character ever created, under the spotlight of the contest organized by Reallusion.
Judge's Comments
We love the story settings behind Miguel’s Cyber-Boxer, and the believable quality for his digital human. This is the first attempt of Miguel in using Character Creator, and his goal is to have fun in creating a character with the new workflow.
Looking forward to seeing more of Miguel’s creations in the future!
Winner Prizes:
- Cash Prize: US $1,000
- Sponsor Prize: Faceware Realtime for iClone
- Sponsor Prize: ArtStation Pro Annual Account
- Sponsor Prize: Texturing.xyz Skin Starter Pack (Personal)
Testimonial - Joe Lo
I always wanted to create inspirational characters. My story began 4 years ago when I won an honorable mention in a character design contest. Yet, I could never imagine myself being the third place in today's competition. During these years, I spent countless nights mastering various 3D tools after finishing my daytime accounting job. I couldn’t tell you how excited I was to successfully render and illustrate the transformation of a wounded old lady to a perfectly shaped evil queen. I wish she could inspire everyone to do things they never thought they could.
Judge's Comments
It’s interesting that Joe created a behind the scene story for The Evil Queen - the queen has the ability to heal herself, and transform herself from evil form to human form. To achieve this, Joe created two sets of skin textures for this character by using Character Creator’s SkinGen tool. The work in progress is impressive, which is detailed like a tutorial book. The final display images and videos also show how much effort Joe put and the amazing results he achieved.
Winner Prizes:
- Cash Prize: US $500
- Sponsor Prize: Faceware Realtime for iClone
- Sponsor Prize: Substance Indie license 1-year Subscription
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The judging process for "Digital Human Contest 2020" proved to be quite difficult and thus took many hours of deliberation to come up with the final winners. Although the following entries did not get the top prizes, Reallusion felt the need to praise their outstanding workmanship and spirit of sharing with an honorable mention.
Sherlock / Benedict Cumberbatch Likeness
Konrad Hetko
"When I was working on the Sherlock likeness I was really worried to not make it on time. I started 2 weeks before the end of the challenge.
The Headshot plugin came to the rescue, it helped me develop some basic forms and proportions that I could later define in ZBrush. I wanted to push the likeness even more with custom-made expressions, but time was too harsh on me.
Another life / time-saving feature was the Auto Setup for Unreal. Thanks to that I didnt have to spend hours on the shaders, everything was set up automatically and only some small adjustments were needed."
The Visioneer / Beetlejuice Likeness
Anthony Hayes
"Character Creator 3 combined with iClone 7 speeds up my production in game development. This contest proved to me that it’s worth investing in these tools, as I was able to use this contest as an R&D. I must say, I’m impressed. Moving between CC3 and other software outside of Reallusion production was a breeze. I recommend that every video game studio integrate Reallusion’s products into your pipeline."
Sally
Pasquale Scionti
"For this project created with CC3 and iClone, I got inspired by The Last of Us Part II. My intention was to create a character with some dark vibes, so the focus was on her facial expression the way she stares to tells the story. Other elements are the axe and the blood on her face, the mystery is behind those eyes as who knows what happened? Did she defend herself or is she the killer?"
Nina
Luis David Zavala García
"It was a good experience to experiment with new software and get out of the comfort zone of my design process, I really liked the style and creative line of my character and I think I will continue with this later. It is the first time I used this software and it helped me speed up my workflow, mainly it helped me with the rigging, pose and animation part which I am not very good at and maybe I will continue experimenting with it later."
WuTang Clan - Ol' Dirty Bastard
Alexander Siedlarek Tarrida
"This contest really pushed me, especially because of the little time I had to execute my idea due to the current world situation. It was great being able to record and track my workflow which helped me plan better as well as clean up and give me a good understanding of the steps I had to take. I would have loved to play more with the Texturing.xyz maps and create an even better and realistic result but I am super happy to have made a WuTang Clan character. I currently work freelance for 3D printable models and creating a model in this way has really helped me study and research another way of creating models. I really appreciate Reallusiion organizing these contests and I can’t wait for the next one."
Guns For Hire
Haoui Adel
"As a self-taught guy I love learning new stuff. Thanks to Reallusion for this contest as it helped me stay motivated and challenged. When I saw the contest on ArtStation, I decided to enroll and see what I could come up with. My goals for this contest were to understand the workflow of realistic character creation and to learn different software and tools along the way.
I watched a great deal of tutorials from the Reallusion Library on CC3 and ZBrush. And I must admit that I was amazed with what Character Creator can do and produce in a small amount of time, it can be an excellent solution for gaining back time on a project that is in danger of running late.
I really liked working with the CC3 Pipeline as the interface and workflow are very intuitive, making it more fun to create characters. The result was very rewarding and gave me a sense of accomplishment."
Viking
Nicolas Sequeira
"My process of character creation is exporting the base model from Character Creation 3, and taking it to ZBrush for detailed creation. For outfits and accessories, I used 3ds Max for modeling, Maya for final uvmap, and ZBrush for more detailed sculpting. To create the face texture, I used the Zwrap plugin with a Texturing.xyz texture map. The rest of the textures are painted in Substance Painter and Mari, combining the textures with the aiStandardSurface shader in Maya. The hair was created by using XGen with its standard shader. The final render of the character was done with Arnold Render."
A Royal Dwarf
Jaskaran Singh Grewal
"I started my 3D journey from character creation and I do understand how technical it is. But soon after, I branched to other areas and didn't get much opportunity to do character work. That's the reason I started to use Character Creator for my character needs, so I could focus on other areas. This is what I tried to demonstrate in my entry. The entire scene took me about 20 hours from start to finish and I couldn't be happier."
Mr. Smith
Wolfgang Stockinger
"I am very happy to have participated in the CC Digital Human Contest. This is how I got the incentive to create a character in Character Creator. Unfortunately I decided to participate in the contest only 2 days before the deadline. Therefore I didn't have a big exchange with other participants. However, the excellent work of the other participants really motivated me to give my best, as I soon realized that the quality of the work was very good. The interesting solutions of the other participants are exciting to look at and I think that we all could learn something from each other!"
Bridge Guardian
Tommy Ling LU
"With its fully rigged base mesh and various morph modifiers, I can easily get a perfect foundation to work on. Also as I was rigging the armors to my character, switching to different set motions from the CC3 library instantly showed me which part was wrong with my rig. Not to mention the one button export to Unreal feature just saved so much time! Overall, the entire CC3 pipeline experience really made creating 3D characters so much more fun and enjoyable. It also boosted my confidence as I am now more determined than ever to polish my skills even further in learning about texturing XYZ as well as Xgen."
Danique
Aron Versteeg
"Thank you for naming me as an Honorable Mention. I only started educating myself on Digital Humans about 1.5 years ago, so it means a lot to me! The contest gave me the opportunity to tweak my existing workflow towards Realtime applications by focusing more on artistic aspects like posing, lighting and cloth dynamics. Besides that, I wanted to challenge myself to find an efficient way to model more complex realtime hair setups. All-in-all Reallusion provides perfect solutions for that."
Mona Lisa CG Portrait
Jayesh Shriniwas Naik
"It was a challenging competition for me because this was my first real-time character. I mostly do likeness digi-double and CG portraits for VFX Films. It's an honor for me to have made a CG Mona Lisa. ZBrush is great for sculpting character and cloths with R3DS, with TexturingXYZ for surfacing, Marvelous Designer for clothes, Substance Painter for hard-surface texturing, Maya for XGen hair and hard surface modeling, and finally Character Creator for making real-time characters. A special thanks to Reallusion for a great competition and Sefki Ibrahim for his awesome tutorials."
Tezzeret
Charles Peckstadt
"It was a great experience working with Character Creator. The fast start you get with the customizable base mesh is great. I loved the fact that you could bring in your mesh at any stage of the process and check things out with a nice little pose, this is a great way to have a better feeling for your character early on. The SkinGen tool is also a neat addition that can get you some nice fine tuning in your character. Would definitely recommend it."
Corina
Ernesto Salvador Ramírez Blanco
"Looking for a base to streamline character modeling work, I found the Character Creator contest which offered high quality tools and characters that were already rigged. Making it easy to send to ZBrush, thus reducing work time without worrying about certain technical details. This allowed me to totally focus on the artistic and character designs part. (I love it). And the most important thing is that they valued our work."
Ancient Astronomer
Andrius Beconis
"Smooth, enjoyable, and very fast. Three words that first come to mind when thinking about the overall workflow. The thing I enjoyed the most was that Character Creator let me jump to different applications, make any changes I want to the character, and come back fast and smoothly.
I was able to create everything I wanted, very fast, without any compromises."
Funke
Femi Falade
"My workflow for the digital human character began with a base mesh from Character Creator 3. I started by exporting the character out of CC3 to Substance Painter where I textured the character's skin to appear more African. Then I utilized ZBrush for sculpting, Maya XGen for hair, Marvelous Designer for clothes, Maya for custom face and body rigging, etc."
