Character Modeling - Yusuke, the Bandit
Hello everyone! Here is my entry for this year's Rookie Awards for the game development category, a real-time game character I've dubbed Yusuke, inspired primarily by feudal Japan with a fantasy twist. I hope you enjoy!
Hello everyone! Here is my entry for this year's Rookie Awards, a real-time game character I've dubbed Yusuke—I created this character for my degree project for the Game Artist education at Futuregames. For this project, I wanted to create a character inspired by feudal Japan, but with a fantasy twist to it; and while I didn't follow a specific concept for this project, I was primarily inspired by the character work done in the game Ghost of Tsushima by Sucker Punch. From a technical perspective, I wanted to delve into techniques that I hadn't had much of a chance to explore before, such as clothing creation in Marvelous Designer, the hair card workflow, and rendering in Unreal Engine, as well as generally improving my sculpting workflow. Thanks for popping by, I hope you all enjoy this entry!
Since I knew I wanted to take some close-up renders of the face, I spent quite some time refining the skin textures and the material set-up in Unreal Engine, creating instances of the materials and exposing the parameters so I could easily tweak things like specularity and subsurface scattering on the fly. Bonus black-and-white render at the end in honor of Ghost of Tsushima's Kurosawa mode!
A breakdown of Yusuke's different texture sets, not including the hair—for which I used an existing set of hair cards by Maria Zatorska on ArtStation—and the eyes, for which I decided to use the eye shader that ships with Unreal Engine's Metahuman project and had UV'ed the eye meshes accordingly in advance. While the intended texture sizes for in-game use are indicated in the images above, I decided to export the textures at 8k resolution for the sake of the final renders. As I mentioned before, I wanted to achieve a believable skin texture particularly for the close-ups on Yusuke's face, and so I spent some time working on the skin material in-engine; for this, I relied predominantly on J Hill's method of setting up skin materials in Unreal Engine.
For the clothes, most of the work was done within Marvelous Designer in order to ensure correct folds, especially since much of his clothing is quite flowy and hangs off his body. I then exported the cloth meshes into ZBrush, and after remeshing the clothing so that I could use a subdivision workflow, did some clean-up and added smaller details such as the memory folds and stitches in the leather jacket. For the face, I wanted to make sure he read accurately as an Asian man, so I spent quite a lot of time sculpting the face to have it convey that. I used ZWrap to project the tertiary details of the skin in order to save time, but the overall result in hindsight would have benefitted from more manual sculpting of secondary and tertiary details. I also made sure to include a rough draft of the facial hair using FiberMesh, to give a better idea of the overall final look of the character.
In terms of the character's "story", so to speak, I wanted the design choices to convey a bandit character wearing a mix of some of the items he's... let's say "borrowed" from unfortunate passers-by; his base outfit consists of rather unassuming clothing, while the outer layers are a bit more ornate. For example, he wears some Buddhist prayer scrolls on his waist, as well as the leather jacket of a mounted archer, on top of which he's layered a tattered robe that seems as though it once may have been of fine quality. This mish-mash of design elements allowed me to play around a lot with different materials and their roughness and metalness, which made texturing Yusuke a lot of fun!
I originally intended to use hair cards for the whole character, but towards the end of the project became quite curious about Unreal Engine's Groom system, especially after the release of Blender 3.5's new hair system, and wanted to convert the entire project to using this groom system—however, I was quite satisfied with the look of the hairstyle I'd previously done using cards, and so I made the decision to combine the groom asset approach of the facial hair with this original card hairstyle. I was initially scared that the difference between the two would be too obvious, but found that the two actually worked quite well together for this character. Here is a viewport screenshot taken of the hair mesh in Maya, which sits at a count of 24.680 tris.
After I'd become slightly more comfortable using Unreal Engine's Movie Render Queue, I decided to film a quick flythrough to better show some of the details on Yusuke's body, and that rounds up this year's entry!
Overall, I'm happy with the results of this project, and certainly learned a lot over its course. As always, there are areas that could be improved upon, but I'm quite satisfied with how my work has evolved compared to last year. Thank you very much for taking a look at this project of mine!
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