CNM 190: Matryoshka Doll
Matryoshka Doll is a project I created for a guest lecture in CNM 190: Advanced Digital Animation in the Fall 2020 semester. In this lecture, I give a demo/workshop on Substance Painter, teaching students how to use the program as well as general workflow tips. I chose a Russian nesting doll to be the subject of my demo because it is a great example to teach students how to observe materials on an object (paint vs. wood), how to think of the surface history of an object, and how to approach shading an object that makes use of both procedural shading techniques as well as hand-painted detailing.
After giving the demo, I continued to finish texturing the doll, which can be seen in my demo reel. Below is a quick summary of my process.
Programs used: Maya, Substance Painter, Renderman 23.
Painting process
After my Substance Painter lecture, I had a doll that looked a lot like this:
Since I wanted to make sure the students knew how to use generators in Painter to easily achieve wear and tear, I had already taken the wear and tear on the doll to a point I was satisfied with during the lecture itself. I also liked the look of the doll’s face, so there was not much to change there, either.
But, the decor of the flowers along the bottom half of the doll left a lot to be desired. Repeating the same pattern felt stale and boring, so I looked at references to get a sense of how flowers are painted. I noticed while more traditional dolls are “dressed” in sarafans with a cowl, the most visually striking dolls simply wore an elegant cowl, under which incredible floral patterns were painted. I was eager to try recreating the painted look of these flowers in Painter - so I did! I painted the leaves first, creating the leaf shapes in the layer mask, then brushed on white and yellow colors on paint layers on top of the leaf fill. I did the same with the flowers, using references to guide the shapes. Next, I embellished the doll with white paint detailing, adding swirls and small dots. Finally, I finished off the textures with some gold detailing - in moderation, because gold paint can be difficult to come by.
Once I was done painting, fiddled with the textures in Renderman (yay for PxrRemap nodes) to get the right balance of roughness for the doll. Then, I used an environment map to light the scene, and voila! A beautiful, yet slightly old, matryoshka doll!
Demo in Substance Painter
For the demo, I prepped the matryoshka doll model, a texture resource (a painting for the doll’s face), and a brush alpha resource (some quickly drawn flowers). I painted the doll’s face following the trends I found while looking for reference: rosy cheeks, large eyes, and small and bright red lips turned upwards in a smile.
An important concept I wanted to discuss with the students is the idea of surface history. I didn’t know the phrase myself, until my co-course reader Ali Yassin divulged the term - many thanks! In order to get the students thinking about how surface history might apply to the props in their films, I came up with a list of “Director’s notes” about the nesting doll which the texturing artist should work on:
Worn from playing: should the doll have obvious fingerprints? Stains? Faded paint centered around the middle of the doll as a child grips the doll to open and close it?
Open/closed a lot: as the doll is opened and closed a lot, it’s likely that the opening of the doll will be quite prominent.
Needs to look good from all angles: a useful justification to teach some techniques/concepts such as using imported alphas to quickly stamp out details/triplanar projection, respectively.
Inside of doll is shown: a useful justification to demonstrate masks and effective UV layout.
In addition, since the students had recently learned how to use zBrush to create normal and height maps, I wanted to demonstrate the Painter approach to highlight some differences between zBrush and Painter. With a quick justification (that all the modelers had left the project; it is now up to the texture artist to create height details such as cracks), I demonstrated painting height details and using anchor points to update other layer masks based on painted information.
Reference Images
To best understand what matryoshka dolls look like, and how I wanted mine to look, I gathered quite a few references. Here are some of the image references I found the most useful in guiding my painting process:
