Collection of Real-Time Characters and Creatures for Games

The New Goblin

The objective was to change the New Goblin from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 into a realistic real-time character model that can fit into Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man. This project took about 30 weeks to complete.

The hair textures were made by making the strands in XGen and baking the hair onto a plane in Substance Painter. The hair cards were placed in 3DS Max using curves.

2D Character Concept Design

The goal of this stage was not to have a complete character concept art piece. Instead, I just wanted to have something to help me get started with Zbrush. In other words, there was more character design work that took place in Zbrush.

High-Poly Model Renders

The concept sculpting stage did not go so well due to time constraints. Ideally, I should be producing several iterations of quick concept sculpts that look like finished characters and select one of the iterations to proceed with a proper modelling workflow (make a bake-able high-poly model). Instead, the concept sculpt was barely recognisable as a character after 7 weeks, so I had to immediately jump into the proper high-poly model creation workflow. This meant that the design and high-poly modelling of the character assets was handled at the same time for most of the character.

Below are the final results of the high-poly model:

Wireframe Views

Insomniac Games gave their main character a high tri-count because they expect their players to get really close to their characters when they’re taking in-game photographs. The Prowler, for example, had around 128k tris. Even though this was the case, I still did my best to keep the New Goblin model fairly optimised. He ended up having around 97,000 tris.

Material IDs & Texture Flats

CAT Rig and UE4 scene set-up

The Flash Variant, Johnny Quick

This is my take on Johnny Quick that is made to fit into the Injustice 2 game. This character is heavily based on the original Johnny Quick design in the Forever Evil comic by Geoff Johns, David Finch, Richard Friend, and Sonia Oback. I made some alterations to the original design so that it has a similar level of complexity as the Injustice 2 characters.

Character Design

The original design was tweaked by using The Flash character from Injustice 2 that was made by Meng Guan and Ian Naud as key references.

High-Poly Model Renders

Wireframe Views

Total Tri-count: 40,736 tris

Brainiac from the game had around 80k tris but I just kept my Johnny Quick model as optimised as I can.

Material IDs & Texture Flats

UE4 Scene Set-Up

Barnie, The Pachyrhinosaurus

This is my take on what the Pachyrhinosaurus might look like if it had been domesticated. It was heavily inspired by the Ark: Survival Evolved game and is made to fit into the said game. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly who designed the Pachyrhinosaurus for the game but I want to give credit to Studio Wildcard, Instinct Games, Virtual Basement, Efecto Studios, Abstraction, and Instinct Games S.A.E. as I did use their design as a base. This project shows my ability in making a realistic game-ready creature within about 3 months.

I named the dinosaur Barnie because it reminds me of Barney the purple dinosaur from the show "Barney and Friends".

Creature Concept

High-Poly Model Renders

Most of the scales on the head were hand-sculpted individually while the scales on the rest of the body were made by placing my own alphas.

Wireframe Views

Tri-count: 91,506 Tris

I definitely could have made the tri-count lower by reducing the number of quads on the straps but I'm not going to change it at this stage.

Texture Flats

Set 1 - Main Body (4096 x 4096)

Set 2 - Seat, Metallic Parts (2048 x 2048)

Set 3 - Straps (2048 x 2048)

Scene Set-Up