Hello, you can call me Maylee !
I’m a freelance and self-taught 3D/2D artist. I’m self-employed as a content creator in Second Life where I mostly sell women apparel under my brand named “The Secret Store”. I started learning 3D with Blender in 2010 when I opened my shop in the virtual world, following a whole range of tutorials from the 3D community. Occasionally, amongst my main clothing releases, I enjoy working on creatures and characters to extend my skillset.
Lately I have been fascinated by foxes and I started drawing and studying them a lot before even thinking to make anything in 3D.
After a while I decided to start working in 3D, I started some very rough shaping in Blender using references.
Once I was satisfied, I imported my base mesh into Zbrush and I refined it using the Move and Move topological tools until I was more pleased with the overall shape. I then started to add more and more details by subdividing my model and until I could sculpt the fur and the finest details.
When I had enough details, I painted my model in Zbrush as well, and I added the eyes and whiskers. At this point I went back into Blender to do a manual retopology work to get a cleaner edge flow. Once the retopo was done, I UV’ed my model and baked my high poly details and painting onto the low poly model using xNormal.
I repeated the same process for the little robin. The decorative leaves, however, were manually painted in photoshop and modeled with Blender. The snow base is a very basic AO bake with a subtle snow texture overlay.
After texturing, I rigged the fox to be able to pose it in various stages for which I made a couple of different props.
Once I was done, I decided to make a couple of renders with Blender Cycles to add these foxes to my portfolio. I set up a HDR environment and a couple of basic lights and framed each scene in order get a lively and storytelling result.
I decided to display my model on Sketchfab as well to be able to add a 3D visualisation to my portfolio. I was nicely surprised that setting up a model was way easier than it used to be, especially with the Blender plugin, I will try to use it more often for sure. I love browsing Sketchfab for inspiration – professional 3D work fascinates me, and I really enjoy looking at other people’s topology and textures and learning from them.
I’m very glad to be on spotlight today, I hope you enjoyed reading this, thank you !
You can find more of my work on my ArtStation Portfolio.. I often stream my workflow on Twitch, you can find my channel here, and you can find my work in the Second Life store “The Secret Store”.
In addition to the links above, you can also find more of Maylee’s work on her Sketchfab portfolio.