Sam (Real Time Character)

Concept by Ningbo Jiang

Since I was little, I was fascinated with the digital world, all the possibilities and innovations present in the medium. I started playing several games from Minecraft, Mario, Call of Duty, Uncharted and several others that came up. After having done an exchange program for a year in the United States and improving my English, I managed to enter the Think Tank Training Centre and study all the possibilities about creating characters for games. Now, here I am presenting my project for the advanced term of the course.

GATHERING REFERENCES

I started looking for references, on all parts of the concept, all kinds of clothes, accessories, textures, including references from real life and games that inspire me with incredible quality. I tried to get as many images as possible to get a clear view of each aspect and to have more comparisons to have each object in its small details.

PHASE 1 - BLOCKOUT

For the blockout, I started from the body and followed the overlapping objects until I had all the objects in the scene. To be able to make the project in the advanced term time, I focused on making the blockout as fast as I could in a way that the character would look like the concept seen from afar.

On most objects I started with a cube or a sphere and using dynamesh I was making the shape of the object keeping a low resolution to make it easier to control the movements with all the brushes, using mainly, move, clay buildup and standard within ZBrush to make all the pieces of this level.

PHASE 2 - HIGH POLY

Moving on to high poly, I started planning early on how best to do each part of the character. In this part, I wanted to dedicate to each object separately and give due attention to getting as close to the concept as possible.

Creating the cloth (Marvelous Designer)

For the clothes, I need to make the pants, jacket and blouse underneath. I created the pants and jacket in Marvelous Designer with a simple pattern and then made changes and details inside ZBrush. For the blouse I decided to do everything within ZBrush itself, from the base to the final part since only a part of it is visible.

Accessories (Zbrush & Maya)

For all objects and accessories, I used the mixture of ZModeler and Booleans inside ZBrush and modeled some parts inside Maya, always keeping real-life scale so that later in the texture part the shaders work without problems.

Main Props (ZBrush)

For the main props, the pistol, the mask and the scifi weapon, I created the base of each one inside ZBrush to get the notion of size in relation to the character, then I created a ztl file for each prop, to add the maximum of detail on each separately and work seamlessly within ZBrush.

Completion of the High Poly Stage

When all the high poly parts were ready, I put everything together to make a render inside ZBrush itself and compare it with the concept, after everything was adjusted, I considered this phase completed and sent separate files in fbx to bake inside the substance painter .

PHASE 3 - RETOPOLOGY AND UVS

With the focus of creating a character for a AAA game, I wanted to create a higher topology and amount of uvs but nothing that would be overkill to be heavy in a game.

Retopology (Maya)

Within ZBrush, I exported each subtool with decimation to import into Maya and use as a live object to do retopology using Quad-Draw. At this stage, I thought about the density I wanted to make and all polygons almost the same size to work with rig and deformations without problems. 

An important tip for games is to leave all parts that would suffer deformations in quads and then do manual triangulation of folds, to work better when baking. For objects that won't be deformed, I try to reduce the amount of polygons as much as possible, leaving the best shape possible.

Uvs (Maya)

For the uvs, I added cuts in the parts that would be hidden and edges of hard surface objects, always looking at the level of deformation of the pixels with the help of a uv checker map. After I had done it all, I separated the objects by materials, to make a udim for each material, using few uvsets while maintaining a higher texture density quality.

PHASE 4 - TEXTURING

In planning the textures, I wanted to make the materials realistic and with the impression of a post-apocalyptic time. I created all the base materials, added details like stitches, dust, mud, oil and damage to all parts, most of these details were hand-painted, so you can convey more reality to the character instead of something very standard.

Clothes, Accessories and Props (Substance Painter & Substance Designer)

Face (R3DS Wrap, Substance Painter)

For the face I used base scan from 3D Scan Store, using R3DS Wrap I designed all the details which I then used to bake and base color for texturing the face.

I used tonal regions, added freckles and bruises and dirt to match the rest of the textures and the theme of the project.

PHASE 5 - RENDERS

For the renders I used Marmoset Toolbag 4, I created a simple lighting using key light, fill and some lights to outline the character and highlight parts of interest.

Using Ray Tracing, all shaders became more realistic and with correct object lighting, I added a slight depth of field effect, some grain and chromatic aberration for a more realistic rendering.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I learned a lot from this project and I will definitely be better prepared for the mentorship term. I would like to thank my mentor during the advanced term, Luis Omar, all my colleagues and friends and all the staff and community at Think Tank Training Centre.

I'm still fighting, learning more every day and hopefully one day I'll get a job creating characters.

Thank you all for taking the time to see my project, I hope you have a great day.