Pavo

Concept

The first character of three that I designed and built for a school project I worked on, Lift-Off Laetus, made in Unreal Engine 4. Pavo's design, as with the other characters, was made to fit within a clean & stylized sci-fi aesthetic. The project itself is a turn-based strategy game where each player controls one of each character, so I made sure to design each character with varying silhouettes, while maintaining a strong visual cohesion between them. These characters were also a fantastic exercise in working along the full pipeline as I worked on every step of the process on them, from concepting to modeling to retopologizing to texturing.

Process

I sculpted this character in ZBrush, modeled the rifle, retopologized and UV'd in Maya, textured with Substance Painter, and rendered in both UE4 and Marmoset. For texturing this series of characters, I deviated from the default Substance to UE4 material setup, which included a combination Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic map. Since our characters didn't need the Occlusion or Metallic channels at all, but did need Emissive, I decided to cut down on the file count by combining Emissive and Roughness into one texture. This new texture used RGB for the Emissive and Alpha for the Roughness, which is definitely unconventional but made the process of setting up materials in-engine a lot simpler for our tech team. You can see this texture at the bottom of this post.

If you want to try out Lift-Off Laetus, or just want to see more of our artistic process, head over to our game's site here!