New project: Ursa Cub Courier

Beginnings of a courier:

Based of the concept by Agito666 on Polycount: Workshop thread

Scientist character

My friend and I are working on a game. There's not much I can say right now but I've been working some things for the past few weeks.

Today I'm showing you progress on the main scientist character.

I haven't done much humanoid character modelling. I haven't done much normal map generation. 

So that's what I've been doing lately!

To start with I made a high resolution mesh. I dont usually go with a specific modelling style but in this case, after seeing this lovely tutorial by CGtuts, I decided that subdivision modelling was pretty useful!

By starting with a low poly mesh and applying a subdivision modifier you can produce high poly meshes with the peace of mind that when it comes to producing the low poly mesh, all the vertices will stick closely to the underlying high resolution mesh, allowing you to focus on simply removing edge loops rather than trying to mess around with traditional retopologising methods.

Of course when it comes to animation, you will need to make sure you have adequate geometry for deformation, but that's not too complicated once you have a low poly mesh which you know is a good proxy for the high resolution one.

The benefit of the subdivision process is that you can use the edge loop selection and delete features to effectively reduce the geometry to something a game engine can handle, while the overall volume matches the original mesh closely. The down side is it may take a while to reduce the geometry back from one or two levels of subdivisions however the benefits are great.

The final reduced mesh can then be modified to improve deformation etc.

Final polygon count is around 12k triangles.

The next stage involves rigging as I want to make sure the geometry will deform and take on the normal map correctly.

Using the riggify tool in Blender made it very easy rig this thing. The only annoyance is the weight painting itself where it can sometimes be quite hard to get the correct deformation in all poses.

This is the result after the rigging process!

For those interested, here are some wires:

I hope to show some texturing soon.

Until next time.

Risen from the ashes

This is a new start for my blog. I will be documenting my personal projects in 3D modelling, animation and game design.
For my first post I would like to show you some of my recent work.

Lester (as in Red Leicester, you know because rats like cheese.. I'll let myself out..)
The character was designed as a courier for the game DOTA2. It was uploaded on the steam workshop.

My initial sketch of the character:

Based on the sketch I proceeded to create the mesh. I ended up having to remove a ton of detail such as ropes, potions and equipment which so heavily affected the poly count.
Fortunately, this allowed me to focus and simplify the design and in the end, stripping a lot of superfluous detail was a good thing.

Next the textures were produced. My process was influenced by the documents on texturing released by Valve however I had to make it up as I went along  for a lot of the process because I wanted to experiment with various colours and multiple layers easily.
I first started with a an ambient occlusion pass which was then heavily modified to eventually become a "Value pass". Essentially I put down all the values I wanted on the character to make sure it read as well as possible.



Blender makes this process very easy by providing 3D painting tools. I simply painted in black and white , using a soft low opacity brush, where I wanted light and dark colours to be while every so often zooming out to check how well it reads. Painting directly over the ambient occlusion I produced a gradient where the darkest part was near the legs and the lightest part near the top of the body. This directs the viewers eyes to the interesting parts of the character.

Here's the result of the first part:

Next it was simply a matter of overlaying colours as described by Valve.
This is the result after much painting and tweaking:

The nice thing about this method is that the value pass gives you a good start for the shading. After that you can collapse layers and painting some more.










The model was then animated as required by the engine. The result can be seen in the following video. Unfortunately I forgot to record the special idle animation, so you'll have to wait until Valve adds it to the game to see it ;)

And here is the final beauty renders of Lester in both ground and flying versions.

Hope you like him!