3D Modelling

Game Character: Ancient Wasteland Female Warrior

Here I will be documenting and explaining how I created my first game-ready 3D character for 4 months at 3DSense Media School.

I had a few concept art that i have initially shortlisted but I ended up with this concept art from luye on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GegJ4B

I decided to work on this character as I personally like the interesting silhouette and I want to challenge myself.

Beauty Renders

Step 1: References

Before we started sculpting or doing anything, we have to find references for each and every part concept. This personally to me was one of the harder tasks to do as I usually jump straight into projects without planning. The concept art I've chosen also did not help a lot has some parts were very unclear so i have to imagine what it would be. Below are my references.

I sketched out how the different items would be layered onto the character so that i can easily refer to the sketch and model it.

Step 2: Hi-res Sculpting

Most of the sculpting is done on zbrush, however the mechanical arm and certain parts of the outfit are done in maya as it is much easier to do hardsurfaces in maya.

Step 3: Hair cards (& a little bit of Retopo)

Before starting to place hair cards, we retopo-ed the head first to reduce the polycount (and so that our working PCs won't crash) and we generate some hair strands. Hair cards were place down individually layer by starting from the bottom. Since my character have a headpiece, i did not place hair cards on the top part of head to reduce the polycount. Yes, the process is rather long so if you ever do this, get ready some music or video to play on the side while you place hair cards.

Step 4: The Actual Retopo & UV

It basically just to retopo the rest of the game character. We retopo-ed it in maya using quad draw. We also unwrapped the UVs into different sections. Face, Top, Bottom & Accessories. Since some parts of my character's UV were too big to fit into the section, they are placed in another section where it has space.

Step 5: Baking

Baking was done in marmoset toolbag 4 and it personally was one of the harder parts of the entire process as it took a long time for me to bake certain parts of my mesh correctly.

Step 6: Texturing

The fun part of character modelling, it's like colouring...but in 3D! Texturing was done in substance painter. After exporting out the texture maps, we will double check if the colors and such are the correct by placing it into marmoset toolbag as that's where the final product will be in. If colors are not right, we go back into substance painter and re-export the new texture maps again.