Monday Night: Loose Pencils and Inks
I’ve always wanted to do this, but the time just never was there. So here goes…
….we get a lot of questions regarding process of developing characters for games. It’s a very subjective process and every artist handles it differently based on their experiences and the tools available to them. I’m going to attempt to bring a loose design all the way through to a final game ready model! Tomorrow night I will update this post with the current loose drawing/inks all nicely painted up ready for a proper 3D interpretation…but I need your help. I’m only gonna do one of these cronies, so I need some feedback on the Elderbeast you would like brought to the modelling stage!
The theme for this set of beasts was old school tough guys/ drapery/ craggy ugly old man toes! Pretty straight forward thought process.
The Big Plan
Tuesday Night: Final 2D rendering
****Alrighty….here’s the colors on these guys. I’m curious if it will sway any of you folks in different directions!
Wednesday night: ZBrush high-rez sculpt
****So I did a pass on the third concept “C” in Zbrush which I now call “Twinkle Toes” (That’s what my dad called me when I was a little kid….ugh). I had only few hours tonight to do the high-rez sculpt, so I rushed the base model in Maya a little which ended up giving me some trouble. My bad. But I think its a decent rendition anyway. I can make the tweaks I need in the low-rez while I bake the maps. Tomorrow night will just be casting and junk. I have life drawing tomorrow night, so I can’t get too much done. See you then!
Thursday night: Casting onto low-rez model in Maya
****Alrighty then, now we’re getting some where. I got the low-rez model made, UV’d, cast and a super basic color map set up. Displaying here are a color map, a normal map and an ambient-occlusion map. Tomorrow night I’ll do the final color map, the spec map, along with a few other maps to get the surface materials to sing. I have a super rough skeleton set up so I can hopefully pose him in a more pleasing personality pose for the final piece. We’ll see, it’s always a gamble with this junk. Stat tuned, my work week is almost over!
Friday night: Final texture maps and hopefully a final render of the model in all its glory!
****Well that does it! I painted up the final color map, spec map and rendered this bad boy out in Mental Ray. I had meant to use a real-time renderer I found, but I had rendered my normal maps in the wrong axis so everything was inverted. This worked fine. On a side note, I am a terrible rigger, so the jowles didn’t translate as nicely as I would have wanted among other things, but this is the best I can do in a 3 hour block. Hope everyone enjoyed this, thanks for all the input!
*I’m well aware I’ve bitten off more than I can chew…but heck, you only die once!