Sunset Overdrive Character progress

Beware, this will be a massive update as I've not blogged the process of making this character. Why? Because it was not going too well, I didn't feel like I was making a lot of progress and overall felt bad about it. But let's reflect on it.


Firstly, I need to address why I have changed my mind on which project to complete last minute. I was behind, a mixture of external issues has limited my time available for this project and doing something completely new like a creature that requires its own anatomy, a good solid concept, lots of references and a special rig was not the best choice for me at the moment.

That's when I stumbled upon this concept made by Rodrigo Ribeiro for a project that's been cancelled and fell in love with it. I felt like I could re-create it in 3d and it would suit the Sunset Overdrive theme very well. That's how I ended up going with that brief instead. I'm glad I did as I learnt a lot and feel better prepared for my FMP.

And below you can see my moodboard of inspirations for this character in case I have to take any creative decisions and overall, what Sunset Overdrive character are designed like. I think the concept I chose blends well with the rest!

I've also made some variations based on the official art, but decided to stick to the original art, I can easily change things like colours and patterns with Substance anyways.

This time I've skipped making a low poly base of each component all together and worked in Zbrush. I did that because All the clothes are pretty tight on the body so I can extrude them easily and any other forms like the mask and the tail are pretty easy to make from primitives provided in Zbrush. I've gotten much more comfortable with the software. I used to just soften my low poly models in Zbrush and add details in it using alpha brushes but now I did the majority of work in it. It was difficult to work on the silhouette in it, however, I'm satisified with what I made.


It might not have been the greatest idea, and definitely not the most efficient, but I wanted to learn more about anatomy so I did a series of studies while making this character. This exercise gave me a better idea of how muscles are shaped and how they poke through the skin on a fit character.

Thought this is too much on a charactered that will be clothed?

Is she done?

No?

Legs.

Back (so complicated)

Quick render of the body base I've made

I've made the clothing by extracting pieces of my body base mesh, zremeshing them and extracting. On the concept the clothing looks rather tight and we can assume that the character is a delinquent so maybe she doesn't fit in her uniform anymore? Doesn't bother with the sizing or just wants to look more desirable but ends up looking funny? Who knows, but I took notes and did my best to translate this information into my sculpt.

Making a skirt took a few tries but I've eventually came up with one that I like. I didn't want it to look too formal or detailed but I needed to include pleats to make it look like a school uniform skirt.

Below you can see my final high poly sculptures for this character.

After completing this it was time to retopo and texture my character.

While I'm using different software and tools such as Zremesher for the retopo process, I think that Maya quad draw tool beats them when it comes to the face. It requires proper polygon loops for animation & texturing and it's hard to get same result with other tools, even when projecting a perfectly retopod mesh or adding the Zremesher guide lines.


In this project I made the mistake of badly organising my objects into UV sheets. The unwrap was also of poor quality. It was inefficient and didn't give me the results I wanted.

Even though I did add effects to mimic fabric, leather, skin, etc, they were so subtle they're almost non existent. My feedback for this project included improving my texture work. I agree as it got to the point that my model's quality has been significantly decreased.

I also struggled with the retopo process as I got so used to cutting corners on the polycount so much in my previous projects that I ended up 10k tri below the budget. It did affect my model and there are visible lines harsh lines, distorted silhouette and even more distorted rig because of the lack of polygons and poly loops.


Here's my summative submission

While I was happy with my improvement of using marmoset, it still wasn't what I have envisioned and I've lost a lot of detail from my high poly sculpt because of poor texturing.

Before the summative submission my goal was to improve the polycount, especially in the important objects like the mask or the clothing. Especially in the areas of deformation that needed more loop support.

I've managed by re-doing my retopo. This also allowed me to improve my UV's, UV packing and therefore baking and texturing. IT was a pleasure to work on this model once I got the technical side down properly.

Below you can see the steps of my texturing. Each element was separated by using ID maps.

I have to admit that the best part about rigging the character was the fact that she doesn't have any fingers. I only used a single bone for the entire hand and it gave me the range of motion I wanted. Nevertheless I needed additional bones for the tail. I'm happy with how it turned out and how I was able to present my work :)

To improve this work further, I would re-do the seams as I can still see some when rendering my character in marmoset. I will keep this in mind for my next projects!