Game ready Ice beast

by JdePERTHUIS on 7 Apr 2022 for Rookie Awards 2022

For this project, I wanted to make a creature as if it would be integrated to Monster Hunter World : Iceborn. It had to match the icy theme, the Monster Hunter artistic direction and be as optimized as possible. Original design, less than 15k polys (quad), 3 UV map (4k, 2K and 512), fully rigged

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Game ready Ice beast

by JdePERTHUIS

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Fot this project I focused on making a game ready creature, as optimized as possible, but still detailed enought to fit in the online multi-player world of Monster Hunter World. I also used the new extention Ice Born as inspiration and went for an icy creature.

I quickly made a sketch of my idea and then spent a crazy amount of time searching for the right body type, twiking details like the tail's end and the horn. I first wanted to make a massive and agressive herbivore, but then decided to go for feline like predator. I obviously used a lot of real animals anatomy as references, manly snow leopard for the thick legs, large paws, and overall proportions. The most difficult for me was to stay close to the Monster Hunter aesthetic, wich is mainly "Horns, spike, and more horns and spikes. and other heavy details".

I also thought about what kind of armor the hunters could create with the monster's part, the main focus beig on the cristal and the white fur. I didn't finf the time to make the character, but I keep it for a later project.

This is the final concept used to sculpt the High poly on Zbrush (I may have clean it for the sake of posting it online, I'm used to working with my messy sketches). The posing might not be very elegant, but I judged it necessary to help the rigging part, having a T-pose on character and creature lessen the risk of stretched geometry and texture when animating extreme poses. I also do not wish to become a concept artist, I enjoy creating creatures and character but I do not master nor enjoy 2D art.

I started with the High Poly on Zbrush, first creating the muscular base, then smoothing it by adding a layer of fat and skin, not too thick to keep the relief of the muscles. The final sculpt always evolve from the concept, I correct things as I go to harmonize proportions and details. The main differences would be in the horns, wich moved a lot due to their complexity. For example I wanted the beast to be able to turn its head without being blocked by the longer horns.

I made the cristal parts in differents subtool to export them separately for the bake. I also created high poly templates of the cristals to have as little textures as possible. I placed the cristals on the body later, and did the same with the claws, duplicating them for the left and back claws. For the texture on the body, I used diferrent layers : Leather, growing cristal, fur, and lastly the details such as scars.

I used a Zremesher on the heaviest subtool before importig to maya, where I cleaned the topology using the QuadDraw tool. I found somewhere on a twitter post that the emblamatic Rathalos from Monster Hunter was made of aproximatively 10k polys in the latest games, so I gave myself the objective of having less than 15k (considering all the cristals and fur planes I would need). And I did it!

-6282 polys for the body, eyes, eyelids and tongue

-7758 polys for the fangs, claws and other various cristals parts

-924 polys for the fur planes

Giving me a total of 14964 polys !! ( 27287 tris )

The texturing was made on Substance Painter. I do not wish to become a texture artist, but I know the basics. I used 2 differents material on the body and another one for the fur. The body parts was separated based on their material (cristalic or not) but also on their proximity, to avoid problems with the baking process, and size, to optimize the maps. I created a smart material for the cristals to be sure to have the same settings on both materials for every cristalic part. The number and type of maps differ depending on the realtime software used, but the texture gives a sufficient result with 3 maps : Base color, Normal and Metallic-Roughness (color, normal and opacity for the fur)

It was my first time creating fur, and I couldn't find any tutorial for real time fur, using planes. I had to improvize, making various back and forth between maya, Substance and Unity to test the texture and the number of planes. The result isn't very satisfying, but it still gives a pretty good idea of what it could be.

The last step was to give life to my creature! I rigged and animated in Maya. I never made a quadruped rig and had to improvize by mixing what I learned at school about Biped rigging and what I could find in tutorial (not much). But I had the advantage of doing it for myself, without the constraints of doing something as simple and intuitive as possible for an animator with his own habits. It was a lot of challenge, but also a lot of fun! I'm eager to learn more about rigging as I wish to become a rigger : you give life a first time to a concept when you make it 3D, but the rig is the final (and very difficult) step to see it completely come to life !