Week 10, finishing up the character project

Modelling and texturing have taken up waaaay too much time this week, especially seeing as I am only doing one of the characters. I thought his big bulky shapes would be easy to model but I have had to start again a few times.

First time I started modelling him I began with a box that I gave multiple subdivisions. I also took advantage of the relax modifier to round off the edges of his torso. This got really messy really quickly. I kind of realised how bad I am at modelling with this project.

  Hi I’m joe, I have a degree 

can I please have a job?

Needless to say I started again shortly after this mess. Instead of going for the box modelling approach I used a plane to start with in the shape of his waist, this was so much easier and nicer to do I wish I had known about it sooner. So my final model looked like this.

This is before I retopologised the model, the polycount was around 2300 at this point but I got it down to 1800 for the final model, considering I was going for a mobile game standard of detail I thought this was a pretty reasonable amount to use considering this character would be played by the user of the game.

Texturing was actually really fun with this project, took about 1 and a half too days so I didn’t end up spending too much time on it like with other projects. I used a cool approach Mitch showed me last year for his face. I found suitable pictures and used the colours from them to inform my choices of skin tones. I also used a soft light layer of a really deformed face and painted over that. Fun.

Yeah he got a bit uglier than the original concept showed

Final render of him is below, I used marmoset for this which is really great for getting beauty shots of your model. I cropped him out from the distracting background though and gave it a few cosmetic tweaks in photoshop afterwards.

So with the character project finished I can start looking forward to Christmas and doing some shopping, Im asking for some nice art books.  Can’t wait to have some spare time to draw! Woohoo!