How I Create Hana: Interview with Instructor Hao Jinjian

1. Thank you so much for accepting our interview. Would you please introduce yourself to our foreign friends?

Hi. I’m Hao Jinjian. I’m a Character Director from an animation company. I’ve been working in CG game and film production industry for 9 years. I love CG from Blizzard, whose designs inspired and motivated me a lot.

2. You’ve been on a lot of projects. Which impressed you the most?

Game CG from Honor of Kings that I had a hand in last year, really left a deep impression on me. It’s characters are delicately sculpted.

3. What is your original intention in making this tutorial? What motivated you to create this character?

Nowadays the industry is getting more developed and there are more materials for learning, but few for learning skin and hair in Redshift. Therefore, I want to create a fine portrait tutorial using Redshift.

4. As there are big differences from Chinese and westerner concerning proportion of human body and face structure. I noticed that if some western artists were asked to make oriental faces, the finished works were of some strangeness. It might be the same for orientals when making western faces. But there’s no such strangeness in your work. How do you control and balance it when making western faces?

I spent a lot of time finding material on the early stage making Hana. I searched many different angles, for it’ll be hard to do it well if there were only two or three pictures. The principle of making oriental and occidental is the same. It is the modeling ability and basic skill that matters. You need to know the structure of skull before making your work. There are many skeletal points in human head. Once the skeletal points are aligned, the features of the character are presented.

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5. I was captivated by Hana the first time I saw it, especially the skin texture. Could you please share with us your experience on making skin? This kind of texture is important in making cinematic characters. What are the requirements for making such excellent skin texture?

Hana has been revised by me so many times, to be honest. The most important thing is that I found out what I didn’t do well in the process and gave myself some feedbacks. When rendering skins, I repeatedly compared the rendering with real photos. I found out the reasons by layer when making comparison, like differentiation of facial highlights, permeability radius of skin 3S, the proportion of pores in the skin. Thus, hand eye cooperation ability could be greatly improved in the whole process.

6. How do you make self-improvement when you are busy at work?

I usually search good artworks as many as possible. The first thing I do every day I turn on my computer is to check if there are some amazing artworks updated on Artstation, or if there are new functions updated on zbrush official website. I take my jobs seriously and I would gather experience in my daily work. I would also do something I’m interested in in my spare time.

7. We’ve seen many students who are impatient, wishing to reach a certain level of height within one or two years. Looking back your journey of study, do you have some suggestions for those students? How should they collect themselves under this circumstance?

Haste makes waste. I suggest student who are really interested in this industry practice basic skill (art modeling ability) more, cause it’s important. The software process is comparatively easier. Do more practice in daily life. Go find a tutorial or check the official documentation of software whenever you meet obstacle. Please don’t be those who are high in aim but low-rate in execution. Make yourself a plan like finishing a work in two months. Your level will naturally  got improved after making 3 or 4 artworks like this.

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Thanks Mr.Hao for doing this interview with us. Hope you enjoy reading it. If you find the tips from Hao useful, please let us know or discuss it with your peers on our discord server: https://discord.com/invite/2NzvDes