Asker online fan art - Think Tank Online Mentorship

Asker online fan art - Think Tank Online Mentorship

In this post, I'd like to share with everyone the project that I've been working on during my Mentorship term at Think Tank Training Center, in the Characters for Games path, supervised by J Hill. This project is still in progress.

The goal of the Mentorship term was to create a game-ready character from an existing concept. Since I felt that I still had a lot to learn, even if it was my last term at Think Tank, I wanted to make sure to pick a concept that would allow me to improve as much as possible in the time that I had left. Thus, I wanted to do a fair amount of hard surface modeling, organic modeling, anatomy, and grooming. 

With this in mind, I finally chose this beautiful concept by Korean artist Woo Kim since it checked all the boxes without being overly complex, and allowed me to work on child anatomy, which I saw as a necessary challenge:

After choosing the concept, I started the sculpting process in Zbrush both of the character and the props, gradually increasing the level of detail:

Except for the hair and cape, the character and props were entirely modeled (and posed) in Zbrush:

Since the character will be optimized for Unreal Engine 5, which supports alembic hair, we chose to do a strand-based groom in Maya using Xgen:

The posed high poly was rendered in Keyshot:

With the high poly completed, the model was decimated and exported to Maya for retopology. After finishing the low-poly model, it was imported into Marmoset Toolbag for baking and then to Substance Painter to start the texturing process:

The texturing process is still in progress, after which the character will be posed and exported into Unreal Engine 5 for rendering. Stay tuned for more updates :)