Intro:
For my Specialism Project, I have been given a few weeks to create a character bust and present it as a statue inside of unreal engine. Throughout this project I will be considering really focusing on the details of the bust of this character; creating an obvious personality and characteristics that can familiarise a player with an environment that they're in.
For example, I will be heavily looking into the style of jewellery and clothing in the 1950's, as it will be important for the character to feel very period to the specific time; this will then go hand in hand with the group project upcoming 'Bioshock In London'.
Art Bible Development:
Breakdown:
For the process of development in this project, is rather simple: I begun all my modelling and sculpting inside Zbrush, this does include my highpoly and lowpoly models. With this particular model, I found that it was challenging to just focus on the bust of a character and the importance of creating personality, age, and general characteristics from a small section of the body.
Due to being experienced in Zbrush my workflow is quite refined- consisting of;
- Creating a block form
- Taking my block form and remeshing the mesh with guide lines to keep a good edge flow.
- Working in subdivisions (essential for an accurate high to low poly bake)
- Taking the low poly into blender for UV Mapping and material allocation
- Marmoset baking for specific results (eliminating any normal baking errors)
- Texturing in substance painter, following a particular rule of mine- to add the curvature and Ambient occlusion maps, this helps to create a stylised look to a model.
- Bringing into unreal engine
- Creating Lighting that compliments the model and it's materials
- colour grading
- post processing effects to complete composition
This is currently, my most common process for creating game ready assets- even through the project I had some slight changes; prior to this, I hadn't used blender, nor did I bake my maps inside of marmoset- but, in doing so, I've created a much higher quality model; for me this is the most efficient way of creating a high quality asset.
Using blender as part of my process is something new to my workflow, and i must say it is incredibly intuitive; I purely used it for creating UV maps and it felt so streamlined, and user friendly, that it wasn't too time consuming once i understand the basic functions and controls of the software.
Feedback Review:
Feedback is something I always feel that I could do better with; however for this project I've certainly reflected on a lot of the feedback given- this is most evident in the character; I wanted to create a fairly young looking attractive lady; however, peers originally saw her to be an old lady, with reflecting on this feedback I was able to improve the model and make it more accurate to the original intentions I had with the character.
Weekly Reflection:
Week 1:
First week of the general production was mainly spent concepting my character and developing a proxy model for me to go off before committing to any hard details within my bust. Developing my art bible and unit brief was also a big part of this week: I wanted to ensure this was developed and finished early on, this was due to having a very short amount of time to complete the specialism project.
I found that in this week I was very time efficient and it allowed me for a lot more time to focus on the quality of my asset.
Week 2: