Presentation - Helmet Character

Often times what looks best isn't the most practical for our projects. 

When presenting my Helmet Character, I do love how her tattoos, skull and staff look with low lighting so that everything else is barely visible. This however doesn't look very good for the character as a whole, so what better place to put this idea than my blog!

Update! Helmet Character

Working on this project I've realised that pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is a lot more important than any ideas you may want to go with because they're too easy. 

After returning to my shaman helmet character to work with the textures some more, I've finally finished this project and I'm quite pleased with it. I often shy away from using emissive textures in my work as I feel like a little bit can turn into too much very quickly, but with the greeny coloured magic I wanted my shaman to use I felt like it would look really good.

Sunset Overdrive Character Screenshots

Now that I'm nearing the end of my project, I've put together some screenshots of my process through my high poly model, low poly model and fully textured model. 

The beginning of the process, sculpting a high poly model in Zbrush to get details in and flesh out the character. This part of the process is one of the longer phases in any project as these details are what will really make the model shine at the end, small details and accents that will be baked in later. 

The next step is the retopology process, creating a low poly version of the model to make it game ready and then unwrapping it to move onto the texturing phase. The darker parts of the model you see here are due to materials added in 3ds Max to allow for 2 texture sets when the model reached Substance. 

Finally the texturing phase, here all of the details are added back onto the low poly model through baking and emphasised with colour and texture for the materials of his clothing and skin. This part gives the model the most character, and arguably can take the most time before it is put into a chosen rendering software to be presented. 

Progress! Sunset Overdrive Character

In between Christmas celebrations I've been making significant progress with my Sunset Overdrive inspired character. He has been modeled to be game ready and the low poly that I have been working with is under 25,000 tris, with a high poly Zbrush model baked onto it via Substance Painter.

Even though I have experience with Substance, I've been trying to push myself this project by really seeing how hard I can work with the textures and so far I'm quite pleased. During industry talks at university we're quite frequently told that a good model will never be able to cover up bad texturing, however brilliant textures can cover up a plethora of modelling issues. While this philosophy obviously isn't ideal, I really need to practice my texturing skills more to feel comfortable enough to agree with it regardless.

Below is a link to a sketchfab post of my model currently, he isn't posed just yet, but my textures are just about finished and as of now I'm pretty proud of how it's turning out. Onto rigging!

Sunset Overdrive Character - Sketchfab

Update - Sunset Overdrive Character

After a lot of modelling and retopping, I've finally started on texturing and have been working on the character's jacket and patches. I really liked the grungy and almost punk look of the concept with the patches covering his jacket, and looked further into different versions of these kinds of jackets and settled on a leather battle vest.

Sunset Overdrive is a very colourful game, so it has been interesting to try and make my character true to his rocker style, whilst also staying colourful to fit with the SO style guide.

Here are some screenshots from my work so far:

Sunset Overdrive Character - Metal Head

For one of my university projects I have set out to make a game ready character model to be a playable character in 'Sunset Overdrive'. After lots of research into the art style of the game and many, many reference images, I set out to make a male character with a heavy rock/metal influence in his design.

Inspired by this concept artwork by Vasili Zorin, (shown below) I really liked the colour palet of this concept and even more so the patches covering the character's jacket.

So after gathering enough resources to feel that I could comfortably model a character fit to belong in  'Sunset Overdrive', I began sculpting in Zbrush, retopping in 3Ds Max and texturing in Substance Painter.

Helmet Character - Shaman Woman, the importance of simple yet effective

I feel like as a character artist I often try and make myself do more than I am capable of doing in a set amount of time. I believe we all like to dream of all of the wonderful things we can make, but being able to actually achieve these ideas in a realistic amount of time is something most definitely worth practicing.

For my helmet character, I decided to go for a 'less is more' kind of approach with a simplistic body and outfit style with a large deer skull helmet and adornments.