I feel like I've hit a wall with my character so let's quickly go back to my research and see what I can do to overcome this.
My issues:
My brief asks for individuality and personality while asking for a NPC character (a bit contradicting but ok)
Theme of my character is an airforce female fighter - she probably wouldn't be able to personalise her uniform by a lot. Also, concept I'm basing my work on mainly uses face & hair to tell personality of the character. She gives the impression of being very soft, gentle, caring, and I'm not sure if I should make changes to the concept for the sake of completing the brief requirements.
First, I'll break down exactly what I like and don't like in concept I'm working from and what can I do to give my character more personality.
I did a few iterations of my design (below) and have decided on giving my character more personality by giving its purpose and making it an air force mechanic. I've given her tools, some patches that air force and a glove inspired by a reference image of a real plane mechanic. I'm also going to add some personality with dark oil splotches, dirt and overall wear on her clothes with texturing. I still need to seek feedback if the badges are a good idea though as I don't want to interfere with the original concept too much. Badges from these iterations are from CS:GO and Call of Duty, I'm going to make my own for the real thing, this is just a concept.
To finish off my model I've made the accessories like the tools but also added some subtle details that added realism like pores, mainly for practice. I based placement, concentration and size of pores on HD close ups of human faces which surprisingly were very difficult to find online. My personal tip is to search for celebrity close ups!
Since I've finished my high poly model it was time for texturing! To move on I had to retopologise
my model first. I did majority of this process in Maya, with the quad draw tool, working on decimated high poly models. However, for some of the models like the helmet for example I had better results when making my lowpoly model with the Zremesher tool in Zbrush. I found that it worked really well with spherical objects and retained the key curvatures of my helmet, not affecting the silhouette while reducing the polycount from 1 million to a thousand. I still had to remove polygon loops and improve the topology by hand and I did that in 3ds max. Even though I was doing it directly on the model I was trying my best not to affect the overall shape and simply remove loops in areas where polygon density is abnormally high.
I had a lot of elements so documenting each of them would be very painful so I've picked some of them to present with screenshots:
Firstly, I'm going to show how I did the retopology of the boot asset. This definitely the most difficult asset to bake for me, mainly because of the laces. In the end I had to flatten the laces, but I still didn't like the result of baking them on the boot itself. The reason being is I was not planning on giving boots so much pixel density on the UV map as they're a minor asset. Therefore I decided to sacrifice more of my polygon count on the boots to make up for it and make a low poly model of the laces.
I did a few attempts of baking this model, firstly with maya but it didn't give me great results as you can tell from screenshot below:
I solved this problem by using the zremesher tool instead, even though the zremesher product was too high in polygons I was able to easily reduce it manually. It actually didn't take that much time since the asset is not that complicated, and I managed to get a good test bake which is all that matters :)
In the beginning I did struggle with the laces a lot but managed to get them done mainly thanks to the zremesher tool and cleaning up the topology by hand in 3ds max.
And here's a process of retopo process for the face asset. I did this in maya as it gave me a lot more freedom while working on topology. It was crucial to get these loops right to make it easier down the line for animation. I'm happy with my result :)
In order to get an accurate bake and retain the same level of detail on each piece I've merged all the assets into 2 objects. One that contained models making up the focal point of the character e.g. face, hair, waist vest and the jacket, while the other object contained models that still needed high resolution like her pants, boots and helmet but were not going to contain such level of detail. I knew that the helmet is in fact the focal point of this project so I'm going to save a large UV space for it.
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