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.