Game-Ready Flamethrower Girl

Semi-Stylized Flamethrower Girl

(快快快，不要像个老太太)

Full Character Renders

Flamethrower Close-ups

Concept

The plan here was to make a complete Game-Ready character. Initially wanted to try out AI for providing some good base character designs but unfortunately, even after a lot of iterations, I failed to get a solid Character Design. Thus I went with Character Designs by the very talented artists on Artstation and a particular artwork by https://www.artstation.com/mmerler caught my eye. There was not much of a mood board creation for this character since the good concept art made the 3d conversion process very smooth. Some design changes were made in order to make the character look better with the semi stylized Artstyle.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lVl0zG

3d Modelling

Flamethrower

For the 3D modelling part, I started out with Modelling the Flamethrower first since it seemed pretty interesting. I tried to model only the details that needed to be modelled in 3D and le\fte a few of the details like scratches and damages to the 3d Texturing. By doing this, I cut down a lot of time needed for the Retopology phase since I could now just delete or merge a few components to get  a Low-Poly out of the High-Poly.

Character

For the modelling of the character I followed my usual workflow of first blocking things out in Zbrush using Sculptris and Dynamesh, then either Zremeshing them or doing a manual retopology for further sculpting of the details as High Poly. 

The details were made using various methods like surface noise, alpha brushes,3d scans and manual sculpting.

Once the retopology was over, I UVed the components into 3 different texture sets. I did not go for the UDIMs workflow due to the limitations of the workflow in certain softwares.

Texturing

For Texturing, I chose Substance painter. I used the ACES color management workflow to have more accurate color representation in ACES supported softwares like Maya, Marmoset, UE, etc. I split the flamethrower  and the Character into two different files for ease of work. 

1. Baking

For baking the textures of the Flamethrower, I used the basic Low-Poly to High-Poly baking using mesh names in substance. For the character though, I had to use a combination of Substance painter's  Low-Poly to High-Poly baking  and Zbrush's multimap from subdivision for better baking of parts with lower distance like the gaps between fingers, lips, etc.

2. Texture Paint

For the texture paint stage in Substances, I tried to keep the workflow as much procedural as possible. I greatly relied on using anchor points and filters in substance painter to create the various effects. 

(Pro Tip- Using a lot of subtle variations in colors and roughness is the key to making the textures look more believable and realistic. Also, observing similar materials in real-life can be very helpful)

Posing

This is the stage that took me the longest and was the most frustrating. I decided to Rig and Pose the character in Blender before exporting it to Maya for Rendering. It was initially easy since i did the basic Rigging using Mixamo and further refined the Weight Paint in Blender. The main issue came when integrating the Jacket into the Rig. The jacket, being double sided and inflated, was a bit tricky to get done. Finally I got the pose down and did some Shape Changes to Deformed areas fit the Pose better.

Hair Grooming

I used Maya's Xgen for the hair grooming. It was a pretty generic character hair set up with different kind of maps and modifiers to give it a organic look while still keeping an interesting shape.

Rendering

I chose Maya for the final rendering since Arnold offers the best results when it comes to rendering realistic skin. A basic light set up with a basic circular floor was put up. The textures did not need any work within the shader thus it was a basic shader set up process. For the hairs though, I used a ramp and some noise to give some break-ups to the color.

Conclusion

The project took me about 2 weeks of work in total. During this period, I came across a lot of new problems in various stages which needed to be solved since this character went through a complete Game-Ready Character Creation workflow starting from Concept to Posing and Rendering. It helped me a lot as I could learn from these mistakes and will be useful in my future projects. By the end, I think it turned out presentable but I definitely wish I did some of the things differently from the beginning itself. Will keep the grind going and do better for upcoming projects. Do give a like if you have went through the complete post and liked it.

Thanks!