Making of Character

Concept.

This is a class project to create a rigged and animated game character using a game studios work pipeline.

The game company i chose was Eidos Montreal focusing on there character art pipeline from Deus ex human revolution. 

My idea for this character was to do something different and a bit of a rigging challenge. The work flow from Eidos worked well for this, they are able to put high detail into there main characters by only showing them in small rooms and rarely putting two together. This allowed more freedom in terms of memory, and can be much more complex and unique. 

Modeling 

Starting off in Zbrush I modeled the top half of the body and face. This was a bit of a slow process not been very familiar with the program, but sticking to the work flow was one of the project criteria. After the body was looking good, I started painting out were i wanted the muscle straps to go.








Using the extract tool on masked areas I was able to get the chest plate to follow the outline of the body.  

I then exported the model with the polly paint into Maya. Using the quad draw tool to get the edge loops in the right spots, extruding them out to give the muscle straps their shape.

Sculpting the lower half of the body into shape, and then using the same extract process to give it the plating. 

The legs were made using zspheres and then exported to Maya to to quad draw out the metal plates.  

Both the spine and hexagon chest piece were made using a duplicate along path script, were it takes an object and duplicates it along a nurbs curve.  

Back to Maya for retopology using a combination of Zbrush z remesher and Mayas quad draw.  

Texturing 

All textures were created inside Photoshop, and broken up into two parts, the top half of the body and the lower half. The normal and ambient occlusion maps were made using Xnormal.

Rigging 

The rig was made in Maya, it has full FK/IK blending, custom attributes and a joint based facial rigging.
This made the character essayer to animate.    

Animation

the animations consist of a walk, run, idle and pose. these were imported into the Unreal Engine 4. With some blending they were assigned to the character.  

Video was created in in unreal 4 with the persona animation system. 

Summery 

I enjoyed working on this character, it presented so challenges along the way never having started off making a character in Zbrush. The rig was also challenging bee the first time i have made a joint based face rig. the only part I would redo was the concepting stage. I had the basic idea of the character in my head when i started, but because of the unique design there was a lot of things i did not take into consideration. this effected the time spent on the modeling stage and threw my time line out a bit.

Displaying the character in unreal 4 was also a challenge i did fined the persona animation system easy to use. setting up a character controller in blue print was a bit harder but with some help from a programmer I was able to work it out.
       
The character itself came out came out close to what i wanted. A sleek and agile looking character with a unique design.