Technical Breakdown: Realistic Pandaren Character and Environment

DEV LOG IN PROGRESS TEST WILL APPEAR OVER TIME =D

The Journey so far

SOOO, a little update. Character turnaround is done which means its almost ZBrush time. I'm really very happy with how this turned out because 2D art isn't a huge strength but I'm really excited to be able to produce stuff like this now, it honest is making my life so much easier when it comes to design work. 

Moving on with the project means Ill need to consider how I'm going to mo-cap this and how I'm going to render the fur. For Mocap my biggest issue (in case you're new here) is that this pandered character does not share human proportions, but I will have to use human mocap data (obviously) so the issue ahead of me is how do I translate the mocap data on a non human rig - Well! My initial plan is to use constraints to allow the mocap to drive the movement on my rig, however setting this up will be time consuming, so I would like to create a python tool in Maya that will:

- Look at the mocap joint info
- Map that info to my rig
- Constrain movement and rotation to the correct bones / joints

Now I have never used Python before but I am very familiar with C# so I'm hoping I can work this out, because its a common problem and I would love to help solve it.

Moving onto the fur, I'm going to be using XGen to create the groom then importing it into Unreal using the Alembic groom importer which should allow me to bypass the cards phase and create a much for natural looking fur - which would be amazing because I'm really trying to push the quality of this character and environment as far as I can!

Until next time! I'm going to continue working - as always if you have any comments or feedback or suggestions please comment! 

Teaching to Tech Art - Chapter 2

Year 2 on Uni is upon me as is my commercial asset production for realtime (CASPR) module! My task is to create a modern take on a WoW Pandaren character including scupls, models, textures,  a rig, mo-capped animation and an entire environment, phew. It’s gonna be a wild ride. 

This will act as my dev log so enjoy (or not) the process and feel free to make comments on any or all of what you see its super useful for me professionally but also for reflection purposes. Thank you!

Modern Pandaren - Planning

I started this project by doing a tonne of initial research (below), I have never really done a character before so I’m going to need to answer a lot of design questions early on to avoid technical issues later on, I have a few considerations that need to be mindful of as I progress, the first of which is the Mocap element of this project, We will be using a human actor who will likely not have Pandaren proportions so I will need to really emerge myself in mocap before I need to (if that makes sense) to that end Ill be helping out with Xsense and Optic mocap over the next few months whilst also testing out some mocap data on a test rig I plan to setup as soon as my character is fully realised. 

These kinda of things are only fun when you make an outlandish statement that later on in the project turns out to haunt me so here goes: I’m pretty confident ill be able to build a rig that accounts for the difference in proportion between the character and the actor, that being said as of right now, I have no idea if that’s true so lets hope moving forward this isn’t an issue!

Following on from research, sketching is playing a huge part in this design process, whilst the lore is based on Warcraft I really want to create something that is totally unique, which means exploring everything through iteration which I love doing. 

Initial sketches

My initial sketches are just my way of trying to explore different ideas, I am trying to force myself to explore extremes of the design early on to see what’s possible and hopefully produce something it is unique looking but convincingly WoW/ Blizzard-esq in its design. I know I’m going to have Otto sculpt this fully later on so again I’m trying to consider different body shapes and begin to explore how things like body fat could be stored and how it may hang off the body. In my mind the sooner I answer these questions the smoother the process will be.

I like all the designs in their own right but the one ill likely take further is design 7 (codenamed chonk) because I felt this gives me a solid frame with which I can explore a lot of different potential later on, I also want to keep that stylised feel wow characters have whilst pushing the fidelity of the final product in a way we (hopefully) haven’t seen before in a game engine

As I write this is I know I’m going to need to explore the lower half of the design for this character more in the next few weeks, but for now I just wanted to see what what might fit and what might not, this process involved me overlaying reference legs and doing a quick sketch to work out their fit, I’m immediately against design 2 because the proportions are too human, Pandaren have a very recognisable silhouette which I’m keen to maintain, design 1 I think fits best but I can’t help but be drawn to design 3The legs need to be a bit shorter but I like the overall shape, they are suitably stylised, whereas design 1/2 are very human. Still not sure which direction ill go in right now, all I know is that this character’s RIG will need to map to humanoid mocap data so ill need to workout a way of keeping the skeleton proportions humanoid-ish whilst keeping the silhouette pandaren. No small feat. 

I explored a lot of different styles of face for this character before deciding which to take forward. I wanted to explore a wide range of possibilities because I have no idea what the face is going to look like, but it IS arguably the most important part of the design, this character is going to be a good guy rather than a bad guy and a lot of that narrative is told through the facial features. I have also never drawn any kind of faces before so I was excited to give this a go. Not the best stuff ever BUT I was very happy with the range of designs I was able to communicate.

Design Page 2 design 4 was my personal favourite after combining the realistic head (Page 1 design 3) with  the more stylised facial structure from other designs.

I will re-present these in the next few days as they’re all of over the place but I was initially really worried about the eyes. I mentioned above I hadn’t drawn heads before so now I had to draw eyes. As you can see my initial designs were really off really sloppy and didn’t really communicate much difference they’re kinda the same design re-hashed over and over, it took me a little while to get brave and try for something different I was also well aware that the eye structure I was looking for Chinese, and I’m a white British guy! So reference played a huge part in creating these designs. I eventually ended with design 10 which really stuck in my mind It just felt right, had a lot of character and left a lot of room for shading exploration later on.

Still also working on eyes and face but Im really happy with the general direction these have taken.

Face shading tests

Fur Tests

Refinements on feedback