Owner of a Lonely Heart - By William Ferrari

This project is being made for my Senior Animation Studio. I am making a creature based off ideas from a Spider, the galaxy, and humans. When I first made the design, I was listening to the band Yes, and from that, I named my project Owner of a Lonely Heart. This is the first 3D model I have created, and it will be the second 3D model I will animate. 

Above is my model which I recently painted in Substance Painter. I love the hour glass pattern of the black widow, as well as it's sleek black color, so when making the body of this character, I wanted to give them wide hips and a triangular chest. I gave it the necessary human features (arms, legs, hands, shape of body, head), so it could be recognizable, but still have the feel of a galactic being. Below are the Silhouettes of OOALH.

Once I had chosen OOALH to be my creature, I brought the Silhouettes into ZBrush, where I made the first design of the model. 

Before bringing the model into Maya for the Retopo, I updated the legs and the hands, which you can see below. For the legs, I simply returned to the model and changed them to more closely resemble a human leg. For the hands, I created a new object in ZBrush, modeled a new hand, cut the original model in half, removed the original hand, placed the new one on, and mirrored the model. 

I found that the beginning of the Retopo process is the most important part, because doing this part wrong can waste most of your time. On my first attempt, I started on the arms, and made the entire body from there. When I showed me teacher, he told me to start from the beginning, and instructed me to do what I did above. By working on each part individually, and then connecting them, I was able to drastically reduce the poly count. An important note to add is that each time I made a poly on any surface, I made 8 polys. Keeping this consistent made it easier to connect the polys when all was said and done.

From here, I moved the project into Substance Painter, where I produced the painted model from the start of this post.

After consideration, I updated the design, as you can see in the close ups above, to have more realistic star patterns. I also added gaseous bodies to the back of the character. Now that I have my model painted, I can move onto to Rigging, which I did back in Maya.

Watching along to an online tutorial, and with some trial and error, I rigged OOALH up to a reasonable standard. There is certainly more I can and may do to better the end product of this rig, but this is where I'm at today. To ensure that this was a working model, I tested the joints and posed it, which you can see below.

You may notice what looks like some deformation on the head. That is a joint placed on the eyes. The eyes are not made to close, so while I don't need joints here, I decided to place some just to see what it looks like when I put Substance on it.