Hello everyone! My name is José Luis Sanjuan. I am thrilled to share my first work-in-progress log for the contest, and I’m truly delighted to participate and connect with this amazing community. Wishing the very best of luck to all the participants!
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WIP Log #2: Outlaw Attire – Recreating 1930s Fashion for Bonnie Parker
Clothing Pipeline & Pattern Design
With Bonnie’s facial structure established, this phase focuses on translating her iconic 1930s wardrobe into high-fidelity digital assets (Artboard 7.jpg). The goal was to capture the weight, weave, and essence of her screen presence while maintaining an optimized production pipeline:
Modeling & Blocking (Maya): The base geometry for her custom sweater and classic beret was blocked out in Maya to ensure correct proportions and flawless skin weights.
High-Poly Sculpting (ZBrush): Shifting to ZBrush, I sculpted the micro-folds, fabric tension, and memory wrinkles to give the clothing a lived-in, organic feel.
PBR Texturing (Substance Painter): The core challenge was reproducing the distinct horizontal chevron and geometric knit patterns of the era. Custom fabric materials were painted to preserve the vintage texture density under lighting.
Smart Asset Integration: To maintain efficiency, the base skirt was adapted directly from the CC5 library, ensuring flawless integration and physics-ready behavior alongside the custom assets.
Historical Footwear & Clean Topology
Historical accuracy extends right down to the footwear (Artboard 8.jpg). Using archival fragments as a reference, I modeled a period-accurate pair of 1930s T-strap high heels.
The focus here was maintaining strict asset optimization. The wireframe highlights a clean, subdivision topology designed to deform beautifully with the foot rig while retaining the crisp silhouettes and sharp mechanical edges of the leather seams and buckle straps.
The Complete Costume Integration
Finally, all elements were assembled and integrated back into the CC5 environment (Artboard 9.jpg). Seeing the initial sculpted face, the custom-textured sweater, and the clean footwear mesh come together against a period-accurate newspaper backdrop validates our creative direction.
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WIP Update: Historical Footwear for Bonnie Parker
Tonight, I wanted to share a quick update focusing strictly on refining Bonnie Parker’s footwear.
To complement her 1930s attire, I modeled a period-accurate pair of T-strap high heels. The main goal here was achieving a balance between clean, production-ready topology and rich PBR surface details:
- Subdivision Topology: The wireframe breakdown highlights an optimized mesh designed to deform flawlessly with the foot rig during animation, retaining the sharp structural lines of the leather panels.
- PBR Texturing (Substance Painter): I focused heavily on the material definition, creating a custom two-tone vintage leather. The subtle scuffs, worn edges, and micro-scratches tell a story of a character constantly on the run.
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Hi everyone, here is a quick update on Bonnie’s current progress before sharing Clyde later tonight. For this project, Bonnie remains my main focus, while Clyde is being developed as a supporting character to complete the scene’s composition and narrative.
For this stage, I focused entirely on fine-tuning her facial structure and surface details:
- Headshot Morphs: Refined the base head model and expressions to better capture her features and 1930s character look.
- SkinGen Texturing: Layered subtle skin details, including age-appropriate freckles and period-accurate matte makeup, to blend her smoothly into the historical context.
- Accessories: Added a pair of custom-modeled vintage dice earrings to give her a small touch of personality and subtle humor.
Looking forward to your feedback as I move into next phase. Thank you!.
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WIP Update: Clyde Barrow - Supporting Character Workflow
Hi again! As mentioned in my previous post, Clyde Barrow is being developed as a supporting character to complement Bonnie and build the narrative layout for the final scene. Here is a breakdown of the production pipeline for his model:
- Headshot & Facial Tweaks: Used Headshot 3 for the initial face generation and base model. Then, applied Headshot Morphs and HD Deformers to adjust his features and bring out his specific personality, followed by SkinGen for the facial texturing layers.
- Clothing Adaptation: Took the base shirt, pants, and jacket from the CC library as a starting point, then modified and refitted the topology in Maya to accurately match historical reference photos.
- Custom Assets from Scratch: Modeled the shoes, fedora hat, gun holster, suspenders, belt, and tie completely from scratch to ensure period accuracy.
- Color Palette & Texturing: Applied a base texture pass in Substance Painter to test and define the color palette. I will continue refining and polishing the material maps later during the final scene composition and lighting phase.
With the base characters ready, the next step will be working on the hard-surface assets, including the weapons (Colt, Tommy gun, and rifle) and modeling their Ford V8 car. Feedback is always welcome!
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Very cool project! As an historian in my day job, I extra approve - VERY nicely done!
Wow, thank you so much! Having an historian approve the project is a huge motivation boost. I really appreciate your kind words!
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