Strawberry 

I created my own character: a magical girl named Strawberry! (A magical girl is essentially a super heroine. A popular example of one is Sailor Moon.) Magical girls hold a special place in my heart, so of course any character of mine has to be one. I gave her ice cream powers, and a very on-the-nose ice cream outfit, because I am a big fan of desserts, and thought it would look cute. I decided to recreate Strawberry in CG, and below is my result!

Process

Modeling

I got the base character model from FlippedNormals. I slightly tweaked the model, mainly in the face, to make her match my concept more closely. I made her nose and face rounder, her lips smaller, and her eyes a bit bigger. The images below show the before and after of the model:

The model from FlippedNormals wasn’t UVed at all, so I had to UV her, shown below. I used UDIMS to get the highest resolution possible on her whole body.

For her clothes, I used a combination of Marvelous Designer and Maya. I used Marvelous Designer for her top, skirt, and ruffles, and Maya for her stockings and shoes. I bought the bows from TurboSquid.

Texturing

I used a combination of Substance Painter, Maya procedurals, and fabric textures found online on CC0 Textures to texture Strawberry. Below is a progress shot of my texturing (and also what her skirt looked like before I changed the design).

Since Stawberry’s outfit is fairly unordinary, I was initially unsure how to texture it. I was confused about whether the waffle cone should look like actually waffle cone, or a waffle cone printed fabric, and I wasn’t sure how to go about the chocolate drops everywhere. Should it be a flat pattern on fabric? In the end, I decided to do an actual waffle cone texture (I think that the waffle cone printed fabric is cheap looking), and to make the chocolate drips separate geometry, “sewed” on with stitches made with StitchEasy. The sprinkles are separate geometry as well. I initially painted the chocolate and sprinkles on, and used a strong displacement map to make them stick out a bit, but felt that looked strange.

Grooming

This was my second ever groom, and I used xGen for it. Below shows my grooming process. For this one, I generated the guides using nhair Hair Systems; this helped me quickly get many guides falling down from the top of her head, which I then rotated to fall how I wanted it. Below shows my process of grooming her hair. I was able to get the end result I wanted out of the Clump Curl modifier.