Hey All! Here’s my ‘WIP’ post for the 2026 Reallusion Character Contest! Because of how the timing worked out with my job I basically had one solid week to smash this out. So this is really more of a breakdown than a work in progress. I haven’t submitted yet, so I’m keen to hear people’s thoughts and critiques!
Inspiration comes from a visit to Eddington gardens a few weeks ago while I was in LA. An exhibit there on hippies and social reform in the late 60’s got me thinking about how modern culture reuses bits and pieces of what used to be cool, pretending like it’s a new invention. I also thought about how even in alternative sub-cultures that celebrate individualism and non-conformity, a sense of belonging often still motivates people to conform in some sense. Even if the thing they’re conforming to is not the main stream, cultural identity and tribalism are powerful things. But if even the most rebellious non-conformists are just following the prototype of current and past in-groups, it really makes you question what individuality really is. Are we all just machines following instructions on how we should act and dress?
So my idea was to make a robot, that was both life-like and mechanical, dressed as a hippie. In particular, I wanted it to feel like someone you could talk to and be friends with. Like it had thoughts and emotions, maybe even a soul. But I also wanted it to be obviously artificial and inhuman in a way that makes the viewer really want to know more about the character and think more about it.
For reference I was obviously looking at fashion from the late 60’s/early 70’s. Woodstock in particular, has a strong visual identity I wanted to tap into.
For the more robotic aspects of the character, I’ve always really liked Sonny from I, Robot. I think he hits the vibe I’m going for, as a character that’s obviously not human, but he’s expressive and visually interesting (also, some of the CGI holds up pretty well for something from 2004).
This was my first time building a character base in CC5, and I had a lot of fun running through all the sliders, and testing all of the different tweaking tools here and there. From the start I didn’t want to over-humanize the character, so I didn’t want to focus too strongly on skin textures. In fact, I was worried that they might give a misleading impression of the facial geometry. So I used the default grey shader for the whole first step of the design process (which actually looks surprisingly good). To get the final head shape, I mainly used actormixer to get the rough shape, then tweaked it afterward. The final face was a combination of two Caucasian female faces, a female Asian face and a male African face (it gave the face a more structured appearance).
Next, it was into blender to modify the mesh. Like Sonny I wanted to have exposed mechanical components. Some other designs I’d found including this great artwork by Alice le Roy: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rlamA5, used segmentation to both make the character feel more robotic and suggest that there’s more going on under the surface. I sketched out the segmentation I wanted on the base using the grease pencil, sketching a few different versions. Then after settling on one, went about deleting sections of the geometry (being careful not affect the shape keys or vertex groups!).
To really emphasize the robotic aspect of the character I decided to put exposed mechanical joints pretty much everywhere. I also wanted gaps in segments where you you could look in to see mechanics inside. I found that I had the best reaction, both in terms of feeling and recognisability, when the mechanics inside vaguely resembled a human skeleton. Modelling half a robo-skeleton turned out to be a lot of work, but I think the effect was worth it in the end!
With the main body’s modelling out of the way, I unwrapped the skeleton in blender, and exported the skeleton and carapace separately to substance painter for texturing. As much as I love the power of node based materials in blender, you just can’t argue with how fast you can get something good-looking out of substance painter. For the skin, I wanted something that looked a little bit weather, but still futuristic. It was also important to me that it had a tactile quality. I think knowing what the character’s skin feels like goes a long to knowing that character. For the skeleton, I wanted to make sure there were some contrasting colours and specular metallic reflections to draw the eye towards her segments.
Back in blender, I started working on the hair and eyebrows next, since I felt it was time to really hone in on the human aspect of the character. I didn’t want to use blenders in built particle or geometry-node based hair systems, because I felt realistic hair strands wouldn’t fit the character. So I modelled the hair using curves.
Next was modelling the clothes. This was mostly a process of subdivision surface modelling, with a bit of sculpting here and there.
The rest of the texturing was done in blender, using a combination of UV image projection and hand painting to accentuate certain shadows and to add makeup to her face. I paid particular attention to her eyes, which were a good challenge. To avoid the uncanny valley while keeping them both realistic and soulful, I opted to hand paint them in a similar way to how I might on a more stylised character, but used materials and lighting techniques more similar to a realistic character. In the end I think it strikes a nice balance of looking real and appealing, but still artificial.
An unintentional side effect of having a character with neutral grey skin is that she’s quite easy to light. I had a lot of fun making the renders and turntable for this challenge. I may have gone a bit over the top with them, but I haven’t got all eight yet (especially because I’m not sure if I can use the vertical one…?). Let me know if you have any ideas, or roasts for the ones here! Also, the flower background is fully procedural. Completely unnecessary, but fun! It’s not technically a render challenge, but I can also post breakdowns for my renders if people are interested.
I also have a turntable here: https://youtube.com/shorts/WvXi2sHlNkI