Game Character - Fire mongol

Fire Mongol

Fire Mongol (based on concept art by Mitch Mohrauser) is the second game character that I have been working on for the past few months during the game character class at 翼次方YCF CG, under the guidance of my teacher, Cheng Xing.

This concept has many interesting details, and we can see the history behind it. So, I wanted to interpret it as well as I could.

I sculpted the high-res model in Zbrush, and some clothes were simulated in Marvelous Designer. Then, I used Topogun to retopologize. The baking and texturing processes were done in Substance Painter. After that, I groomed the character in Maya Xgen and rendered it in Marmoset Toolbag 4. Finally, I processed the images in Photoshop.

Total duration: 4 months

Poly count: 150k with weapons included

Hairs were done in Xgen.

Work Progress

Gathering References

In the original concept, we cannot see the back view of the character. So, it was important to find some references that match well with the concept's style and imagine how weapons and furs are attached to the armor.

Sculpting High-Res in Zbrush

Week 1 to Week 6:

The most difficult challenge for me was sculpting the expression. Because he has a non-classic type of face, I modified it multiple times to match the concept, but the proportion was still a little bit off. So, I decided to add the expression at the end to ensure that I sculpted the correct proportions and made the face more accurate.

Special thanks to my mentor Ziyang, he has helped me a lot during this process.

The Final Face

How I made the armor

The superficial layer of the armor plates needed to be done manually to match the randomness in the concept. But with some customized macros in Zbrush, the process was not too long, haha.

some props

The blade's ornaments were made with the curve function by adding some rope brush on the curves (which were generated from mesh edge loop).

The surface alpha and patterns were made by using displacement maps in Zbrush too.

Cloth simulation in MD

Retopologize

I used Topogun to do the retopology. It's a perfect software who has many functions that can accelerate the whole process. 

Texturing

Grooming

I groomed the character's hair in Maya Xgen with No Brain Groomer's Tool Plug-in, to add some complicated hair guides. Also, I learned from Jeffrey Roussakis's tutorial to quickly generate some pelt curves by using fibermesh in Zbrush. After, I transferred those curves to guides in Xgen and moved them to make them more natural.

It was painful for me who did grooming the first time... But it's always nice to learn how to speed up the workflow and learn from others' works. 

Smi-Ley

Smi-Ley was the first full-body character that I have done during the 3e semester in NAD school, under the guidance of Christopher Cao.

Based on my concept, high-res in ZBrush and marvelous designer, retopologized in Maya, textured in Substance Painter, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 4. 

Total duration: 9 weeks

polycount: 78k quads.

View in channels

High-res

It was a challenge for me to do a character from scratch. But it was a nice way to know my limits and learn from errors.

Thank you for reading my 3D journey, I will always keep learning and improve my skills in the future. 

See you in the next post!

:)