Now that we finally established a definitive artstyle for our game, Tigo could continue to work on the environments while I designed the main character. Since the player is always looking at the avatar model, we wanted to make sure that the mesh looked and animated nicely. The main idea of the character was to design a simple, female, sci-fi character with a cloak. From early on we decided to give her a slender build to represent her speed and agility.We also wanted to accentuate legs of the character with clothing, this reflects the fact that running and jumping are the main types of interaction with the environment.
Early design sketches, illustrating the slender build with accentuated legs.
After making a fair ammount of thumbnails, I decided to block out the big volumes of the character in 3D. I used Zbrush for this. After I was happy with the main shape, I detailed the parts made of cloth, to later bake down to normal maps.
WIP sculpt of the main character
The final shapes blocked out in Zbrush.
Then I took the mesh into 3DS Max to create the low-poly mesh and design the hard surface elements of the Avatar, like the helm and the legs. I wanted to create a clean topology for the character, but I allowed myself to use a fair ammount of polys to get the shape definition that I wanted.
CloseUp of the topology flow of the low-poly mesh.
The final low-poly mesh, optimisation still needs to be done. Some elements need to be added.
After I made the low-poly basemesh, I imported it into unreal to see the result. Some optimisation still needs to happen and some detailed elements still need to be added.
The final basemesh rendered in Unreal, with testmaterials applied.
Olmo Potums