Final Year Project: Alpha Project!


For my final project of my degree, there was much to discuss with the group of guys i had previously worked so closely with for the previous two years, but eventually, we mutually decided several of us wanted to go in different directions, the decision to go solo, and work on an Art piece rather than contributing to a larger game was one i took many many weeks to reach, and while its a massive shame to not be working with such a great group of guys one last time, i feel the decision we all made were the right ones for each of our professional practices.

So with that said, i spent some time over the course of the Summer, playing with very loose ideas, i had already established, through discussions with Phil, the idea of creating a posed diorama as a solo piece, at the end of term. so i explored this further.

I ended up with two loose, basic concepts, the first a Fantasy piece pitting a nimble, but deadly Dark elf character, against a larger, heavier armored Knight, the second idea stuck to the same basic principle, as i wanted to incorporate as many variances between the two figures as possible, however the specific subject matter shifted towards something i had more interest in, having been a practicing Martial artist since i was 5 years old, the characters in question evolved into a Heavily armored, Demonicly tainted Samurai, and a lithe, agile female Ninja (Or Kunoichi.)

So as always, i began with compiling as much Reference and Inspirational imagery as i could find into moodboards, which i could set to my desktop wallpaper so i would see them regularly and allow myself to absorb some of the key features and elements i would want to incorporate into my own designs, before attempting to mock up some concepts of my own.

Initially, i had the idea of Creating the Enemy with a sort of stylized, fantasy, supernatural aura of demonic taint to him, however, while my concept was close to what i had in mind, my 2D skills, in my mind, were not sufficient enough to convey what i had in my head, to the screen, and so i sought to explore this further.

After a discussion with Andy, our course Leader, i took a trip to London to visit the Victoria & Albert Museum, where they had an exhibit displaying authentic Japanese weapons and armor, as well as . many examples of classical sculpture, in order to give me insight into how digital sculptures predecessor sculpted form. This trip was extremely helpful, allowing me to get up close to amazingly well kept pieces, and really being able to see to the smallest of details how these functional works of art were put together and constructed. I managed to get upwards of 500 photos between the two exhibits, and having them as refference would go on to play a pivotal role in how my own project would evolve.

After getting up close with the awesome Sculptures at the V&A, i started to give alot of thought as two exactly how the two characters would interact, starting in the bottom left, with a very neutral, "ready" stance, i quickly decided this was far to static, so began to explore ways to give a larger sense of  drama, conflict, and impact between the two. i liked the three running diagonally from top left, through the middle down to bottom right, but the variance of character height, as well as the sense of an incoming blow imminent, really pulled me towards the top left image.

With these two key features of the pose in mind, i quickly rigged up two character models with the Human IK feature in Maya, and began to knock out the general composition, The KEY focus at this stage, was getting very basic forms into the rough pose, so that i could pan around with the camera and work out how to make sure the pose provided as interesting a composition as possible, regardless what angle you viewed it from, But i also wanted to achieve the two previous points of varying height and incoming violence, my priorities shifted towards making sure the movement and grounding of each character looked as natural as possible throughout their entire forms.

((NOT MY WORK))

Following the Visit to the V&A, i decided i wanted to move slightly away from the fantasy-esque, "stylised" Concept i had created, after being stood infront of such great exhibits, i REALLY wanted to make the most of all the reference i had gathered, and so the character design shifted, i still wanted to incorporate the "demonic taint" of the idea, but instead wanted that to come across through his armor, playing on the way the Samurai's helmets/masks/horn-like crests were deliberately made to resemble demons or beasts.

 I also decided i wanted to incorporate a style of the original concepts thick mane, that is often used within Japanese depictions of demons, or Oni. This feature to his armor would also add to his height, creating that imposing size difference over the opposing character.

 With these thoughts in mind i jumped into Zbrush, and began to block out the general character. There is no intent for detail at this stage, i simply want to start working towards the general feel, shape, and silhouette of the character to swap into my MAYA pose composition scene.

While the overall shape of the character himself was fleshed out in Zbrush, i was simultaneously working on blocking out the various armor pieces and panels within Maya, again i was not concerning myself with details at this stage, so long as the general shapes were there to get that silhouette.

The armor pieces were then Exported from Maya as OBJ's and appended as subtools within Zbrush, and once they were made to fit, the overall silhoette began to become apparent, at this stage, i still need to sculpt the under clothing beneath the armor, the gloves, greaves/boots, the neckguard, the Demons mane and the Overcoat, however the silhouette is still coming along enough to add towards the Maya pose composition.

A Jinbaori was often worn by notably high ranking Samurai, a renowned general, a Daimyo or Shogun for example, and this, combined with the large, beastial mane protruding from my samurai's helmet, should hopefully create a sense of  primal, dread imposing warrior for the rumors of his unnatural, demonic abilities could stem from, while the Jinbaori (Surcoat) adds a sense of regal nobility to him at the same time.

Games Art 15/16

Once again, after deciding on my rough Character design, which would be a mean, tough looking Orc clad in rag-tag armor, i began to source reference imagery to construct a mood board, throughout this research stage, there were two different styles that kept re-occurring, and i decided i would like to capture as much "realism" in my design as possible, as similiar to the CGI Orcs from the up and coming Warcraft movie as possible.

I began out in Maya, looseley modelling a base mesh for my Orc.

Beginning with basic cylinders for the limbs and torso i proceeded to shape them as desired individually.

I then used Quad draw to proceed to draw out the shape of the head from both front and profile views, before repeating a similiar process for the hands and feet.

Once all the pieces had been joined up, i took a look and was unhappy with the direction it was going, after a bit of research and discussions with tutors on my course, it was apparent that juggling both form, and topology simultaneously was too big a struggle, and therefore i decided to scrap the progress so far, and instead, Turn to Zbrush and proceed to create the high poly model first.

I began with the provided, male anatomy tool within Zbrush (Nickz_HumanMaleAverage.ztl) Not my work, and after deleting out the base sub tool, adjusting the proportions and anatomy ended up with something to start out from...

I proceeded to manipulate the anatomy mostly with the move, dam standard, smooth, mask and inflate features, aswell as appended the teeth i had previously made for the maya version, aswell as adding appended rings for the piercings.

I masked off a portion of the shoulder, and pulled it out with the extract function to form the basis of the shoulderguards/pauldrons.

I thenworked on the overal shape, using the flatten and smooth brushes to get the edges and ridges i wanted, aswell as masking off areas for the outer rim.

I also used the mask> Extract mesh method to create the armored belt, using similiar sculpting methods to the torso, face and pauldrons to apply detail, before pulling out the fur lining and loincloth from both the top and bottom.

I played around with various styles for the straps holding the pauldrons in place, but eventually settled for them joined by an appended metal ring, the straps themselves were masked off and pulled from the torso with the move tool, before adding detail to them, i then returned to the pauldrons themselves, pulling out the bandings around the ridges and the large metal studs in a similar manner to the straps.

I masked off the area for the gloves, and excluding the fingers, extracted the mesh, i did the same for the boots, but before i was able to do this i had to delete the toes from the feet by masking them, hiding them and then deleting hidden, before using the close gaps tool.

With the high poly model as close to finished as i could afford to get it, i decided to try to learn Zbrush's re-topology tool, rather than the method of quad drawing the new topology within Maya, to do this, i first merged down all the subtools into one, before using Zre-mesher to achieve the desired edgeflow and poly count. While this tool is brilliant, using it for the first time under a quickly diminishing time limit, this proved to be a mistake, as the finished result was not what i would call perfect, far from it. However, with more time on my hands, it is certainly something i intend to return too and learn to a fuller extent.

The Low poly model before unwrapping.

 Once the low poly was UV unwrapped, i exported both a High poly OBJ from Zbrush and a Low Poly OBJ from Maya, and after loading them up into XNormal, generated a normal and an Ambient occlusion map.