Fall Guys X Disney Princess Skin (Progress)

The brief of this project is to choose a studio/game and address the skills that I need in order to create models in the style of that studio/game. This is the first project going into Year 3 of my studies,  in the past years I did not have much experience working on characters, hence I wish to start on character modelling as well as step out of my comfort zone and learn new software like ZBrush. This is a little overview and documentation of how the project went.

While deciding on which studio to go I found myself enjoying playing casual games more which I'd also like to work on prefer working stylized than realistic. The style of Fall Guys stood out from the list of games I like, the simplistic style of the game and the style of the characters is cute which caught my interest in working on it. 

My goal for this project is:

-Be more fluent in ZBrush, sculpting, and character modelling

-Do and finishes some cool stylized work for my portfolio

-Render and present my model nicely 

Inspiration, Concept:

Fall Guys do collaboration skins with different games or characters, so I thought it would be great to do Disney-themed ones. Also, I would like to do some hair and clothing modelling, hence think the best choice is doing the princesses. I chose to do Ariel, Jasmine and Aurora to have more diversity in terms of outfit style and personal interest.

I have learnt so many technical skills in ZBrush, I appreciate the support I got for getting on with ZBrush, especially for showing me ways to make hair in ZBrush, I am really proud of how the hair of all 3 characters turned out. With more learning as I go, I was able to refine my approach to using Zbrush and realized how much better it is to clean up the model while in the process of sculpting. The finished the not so well made high poly model of Ariel caused issues with the low poly,  so I have to spend extra time fixing the high poly again. 

After doing Ariel I noticed that the texture is a bit plain and flat looking. After getting some feedback and looking closer at the references, noticing there are more highlights on the edges of the character's clothing. So moving on I experimented more with Jasmine on the texturing like adding highlights with different generators, I used to not know anything about generators and only handpainted which makes the process very slow, now I am more efficient in texturing. The result of Jasmine is much better than Ariel, yet I would still want to improve on the visual by adding texture details like creases for clothing with Zbrush, for example with Airel by adding some scale details to make the texture have more interesting and eye-catching details, as it is looking a bit too plain n simple especially on the tail.

The main focus of this project is the pipeline of character modelling, but I still hope to do a small environment to present my models. With the given timeframe I wasn't able to spend much time on rigging and rendering in UE5, though it still gives the models a bit more characteristic.

Reflection for the entire project:

 I feel great about my first character project using ZBrush, being more familiar with the program and more into character creation. I am pleased with the results of Aurora from all 3 of them. There is always room for change and improvement but I am satisfied I was able to meet my goal of being more fluent in ZBrush, sculpting, and character modelling.