"One hit fatal - Rocky" - The Rookies entry 2023

This is my latest project, created during my mentorship of stylized characters on the Odin3D online platform. The character was designed and optimized for use in a real-time engine. You may also notice that it draws inspiration from the visual style of video games such as Overwatch.

I would like to express my gratitude to Odin Fernández, Alvaro Villegas, and Daniel Mallada for their invaluable advice and comments, which contributed greatly to this project. Additionally, I would like to thank my colleagues and friends for their support and feedback during the creation of this character. Their valuable input has been instrumental in helping me refine and improve my work.

This project was based on the conceptual art of Xianyaowen.

In this first part, you can see the final result of the entire character. In the second phase, I will provide a breakdown explaining the process behind its creation.

Breakdown

This is my reference board that I used for the project.  It includes references for real anatomy, stylized anatomy examples, clothing and texturization references, as well as examples of mechanized arms. These resources aided in my understanding of the operation of mechanized arms and improved my overall comprehension of the project and my objectives.

Sculpting

The whole character is realized in zbrush, but for example, the blocking of hardsurface objects I like to do it in maya and finish it in Zbrush.

*After receiving feedback from my colleagues, some of the elements and forms of the character were changed in one of the early versions of the highpoly."

To create the head, I started with a blocking of primitive shapes, worked on it in Dynamesh, and finally applied Zremesher to be able to work on it with subdivisions.

The body, like the head, is also created by starting with primitive forms. This helps me identify the main volumes and forms.

I used Maya to create the blocking for the mechanical arm. Ensuring that all the parts were well-connected and that the arm functioned as a true mechanical arm was very important to me.

I created all of the clothing pieces using the Extract method. While there are various ways to make clothing seams, I prefer to follow this particular method:

Texturing

The first thing I do when I texture in Substance Painter is, like in sculpting, to make a little blocking of all the basic colors.

I apply a gradient to each material and object of the character, and I also use a global gradient to ensure that the character is easily readable.

I have worked with three types of ambient occlusion in this project. While it may not be common, I wanted to replicate the clean style of Overwatch textures.

1.- The first ambient occlusion is the default bake, but it doesn't take into account the occlusion of the different pieces that overlap each other, so I ended up not using it.

2.- The second ambient occlusion takes into account the occlusion of the clothes over the other pieces of the character, and I used it to apply gradients to the entire character.

3.- The third ambient occlusion is the one I used to color the individual elements. It's a mixture of ambient occlusion 1 and a curvature map. Since it's so clean, I think it offers more vibrant color contrasts.

Before adding color to any part of the character, I like to view it in grayscale. This helps me get a better idea of how the shadows and highlights are working, which can be harder to discern in color.

An important consideration is to ensure that all hair strands are consistently mapped in the same direction in UV mapping, to enable easy application of procedural maps, if necessary.

The majority of the details were created by hand or with the assistance of alphas.

These decals were created using Photoshop and comprise the collection that I have used.

*For this project, all textures are exported and visualized at a resolution of 2048.

Lighting

I illuminated the scene in Marmoset using a sky light from a cloudy exterior, which I reduced in intensity to avoid strong shadows on the character. I have placed the lights manually to control the volume of the character.

Here is my specific lighting setup:

Here are some additional aspects of my configuration in Marmoset which I'm sharing through these images:

As a real-time character, I always triangulate the mesh before exporting to ensure that all quads are properly triangulated and the character can be displayed correctly.

I exported the final render with a transparent background so that I could make further adjustments and final touches in Photoshop.

                                         Based on this brilliant concept art by Xianyaowen

                                                          Thank you for your time and attention!