Dreadwyrm Envoy, Game Character

The Dreadwyrm Envoy

Far beyond our solar system, an inquisitive warlock has stumbled into a cavernous mausoleum of dragons. Now clothed in the bones of their lineage, he struggles to follow a path of light while laboring under the destructive desires of the deceased, still lingering long after the marrow has decayed.

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The Dreadwyrm Envoy is a character I designed to fit into Bungie's Destiny universe. His clothes take design queues from some of the amazing warlock armor sets their team have already created, merged with organic parts inspired by H.R. Giger as well as dragon designs from ye olde Dungeons & Dragons.

While I designed the main character, the gun this warlock is wielding is fan art done by me of an existing gun, Outbreak Perfected. Beyond my gamertag, I am in no way affiliated with Bungie.

The Gear

In the universe of Bungie's Destiny, you guide your character across our solar system, pushing back hostile aliens while building your character's legend with fantastic gear. I created the Dreadwyrm Envoy's gear set very much with a player character in mind, dividing him up into 5 pieces: Helmet, Gauntlets, Chest, Legs, and Class Item (a bond for warlocks). Below are the texture sets for each piece, organized much how you would see the pieces in your character's inventory.

High Poly,  Low Poly, & Poly Chromatic

Workflow Snippets

The Marvelous Marvelous Designer

Marvelous Designer was an amazing asset in the creation of this character, starting things off with a solid foundation to build upon in subsequent programs like ZBrush & Maya. The workflow below was used for all cloth parts, such as the pants and gauntlets. Most hard surface pieces started in Maya before being brought over to ZBrush, with the exception of the bone pieces which were crafted entirely in ZBrush.

Substance Designer Materials

A dragon theme was central to the design of the character, so I created the following dragon scales material.  It started with an Alpha built from within ZBrush, then fed through various nodes to tile it, add texture to it, and modulate the roughness. 

The material has roughness variables exposed as well as the ability to change the base color & the scale tint, giving me quick & easy flexibility to experiment with different shades of dragon scales.

This same substance was reused, minus the scale alpha, for the individual scales done in geometry.

Outbreak Perfected

As a huge fan of Destiny, I set out to model from scratch my favorite weapon — Outbreak Perfected (or Outbreak Prime, back in Destiny 1's days). I modeled the high and low poly models in Maya, baked & rendered in Marmoset, with texture work done in Substance Painter. The scene was lit and composited to mirror the press release render in the May 9, 2019 TWAB:

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/47811

https://youtu.be/tkJlZi600To

This project was an endeavor made in the Game Artist Immersive program at Vertex School (vertexschool.com).

Rigged & Ready to Go

A little animation test of my character, with Outbreak Perfected in hand, in an Unreal Engine environment I threw together with some Iceland Quixel Megascans and some sci-fi hard surface structures I made in Maya & Substance Painter. 

Character was rigged using Unreal's Animation and Rigging Toolkit, and the animations were taken from Adobe's Mixamo.

Huge shoutout to John Waynick for his excellent instruction of all things Unreal.