Ubisoft Character Project #8

 

Having completed the textures for my pilot captain, all that was left was to give it a basic rig and import it into Unreal Engine 4. 

I brought an unrigged version my character into UE4 first just to gauge the textures and set up materials and consider lighting. When moving into UE4 I thought about making a small diorama or stand for my character to be on but I ended up choosing not use one, the main reason being I quite liked how simple it was. It may have added some extra flare but whatever I thought of doing either felt half-baked or deterred from the character which I didn’t want so I opted to just have the character as is in my UE4 scene.

Meanwhile on the side I began rigging my character. It wasn’t overly complicated of a rig since the model fit to a basic biped so I just repositioned the bones to my character’s position and skinned the model in its entirety. Skinning is quite a hit or miss process for me, definitely something I can improve on, because I can either skin a section of the model quite well quite quickly or I’ll spend a massive amount of time on one element to get it to deform nicely. Maybe it attributes to my topology but I’ll look into this for future projects.

With my final character skinned and posed, I reimported him back into UE4 and set up a simple lighting scenario, aiming to get the character well-lit from all angles with a bit of rim light for dynamisms. This was the final step for my character as all the bases had been covered now.

Overall, this character was a bit of a learning experience. I came to grips with what kind of style I was comfortable following the PBR process with and learnt a lot about effective techniques to make the character modelling process more efficient. I also know about how I should manage my time and at what points when making a character like this I will need more time and what points I’ll be quicker in. I think the final thing came out quite nice though! I think I hit my marks for style and following my concept so I’m quite pleased with the overall result.

Ubisoft Character Project #7

 

With the whole model retopologised and unwrapped, I imported it into Substance Painter to begin the texturing process. I began by baking each part from the high poly to the low poly and doing any needed clean up on specific areas. Once I had the bakes for each part, I simply began doing all the main texture work.

I started out by laying flat colours onto my model, getting a grasp of if they work well together like in my concepts of if they’d need to be altered slightly. For the most part the flats were all fine and so I started the main body of texture work on the head. This was a process of applying shadows and lights through the generators, really taking advantage of the flow map from the bake. I applied several layers to build up shadows and lighting in various areas to get a nice transition on the skin tone. I also went in and hand painted in some extra portions of light and shadow just to accentuate some features like ambient occlusion on the closed mouth. I also added extra colour to certain portions of the face like some red on the cheeks, ears and nose.

 

This was the kind of process I went through for the whole body when laying down the colours for the albedo. For areas like the buckle on the helmet and belt, I altered the roughness and metallic maps so the albedo was more subdued in some areas. I also kept going in to add hand painted elements to portions of the textures, leaving the materials I generated to cover the forms as a basis and then add details myself where I saw fit.

It was a process that once I got into the rhythm of it became quite quick since some areas didn’t need that much detail additionally added and for the most part, large portions of the character were in solid colours and I just added to the shadows to make them stand out some more.

Ubisoft Character Project #6

I’d swiftly moved on with my sculpt for my pilot captain, adding the remaining main forms like the gloves and the shoes. I also went around the sculpt and refined shapes and added details to parts like the jacket collar and the belt. This was a straightforward process as I knew what style and proportions I should attribute them to and so completing these brought me to the end of my sculpting phase.

 

I’d spent more time sculpting than I’d initially thought but in retrospect I think that’s for the best purely because this stage was where all the major decisions needed to be made. To spend some extra time making sure I was happy with the sculpt and making necessary design changes meant that later down the line I was less likely to need to go back and re-bake something from the high poly or change/fix an aspect of the character entirely. The majority of the problem solving took place in this step so giving myself time to figure things out is probably good.

With all the sculpt finished though, it was time to retopologies and unwrap the model. I exported out the model in parts (e.g. the head, the torso, the helmet, etc) because I would bake them all separately to reduce the chances of artifacts spreading onto unnecessary portions. I’d retopo in 3D Coat which I was familiar with so the process shouldn’t be too jarring and definitely won’t take as long as sculpting.

Captain Character Project #6

 

With all the main conceptualising done for my robot captain, I began sketching out the final version. I created a turnaround of the captain- just a simple ¾ front and back view to show all the main details to the robot. I left it as just a flat colour image as to not obscure the details on the inner workings to the robot.

Alongside the turnaround, I made material callout images for some of the major parts of the robot. The vast majority of the robot is made out of the same material (steel metal plates) but I went into detail on how parts of the robot are fashioned together so that you get a better understanding of how the design worked functionally rather than just aesthetically. I called towards the leg and the head as I had very specific parts in mind when iterating them.

 Moving forward having completed the turnaround and materials, all that was left was the final illustration. It was a fairly simple process of creating a base sketch, applying base values to establish the lighting and then continuously polishing and applying colour. The style of the final render was similar to what I did for my colour iterations but with more depth. It was very geometric in terms of signifying lights and shadows just to emphasise the robotic aspect to my captain. I don’t think this style would’ve worked as well if my captain was a human but portraying the metallic surface in this way I felt was really effective.

 

Overall, I think my final captain ended up coming out very well. Since this was a theme I wasn’t very familiar with at the beginning, I learnt a lot about what kind of thought process you have to go through to figure out what kind of robot you want to make. Researching lots of various media was interesting and it really helped contribute to the final design. I think maybe I could’ve pushed certain aspects of the design like how broken/beaten up the captain looked to showcase more of his rebellion story but finding the line between battle scars and just flat out broken robot was a bit difficult to me and is something I’ll consider more in future.

Captain Character Project #5

 

Moving forward with my robot captain, I created various colour iterations to try and get the feel of a rebellious yet trustworthy leader. I aimed to have the majority of the robot one colour with breaks of contrast scattered in various places sparingly. I did this to not overwhelm the design or make it so the robot looked too new and shiny. I also had to consider that since I aimed to make this a stylized piece, the colours shouldn’t obscure too much of the overall design.

 

With these colour variations, I got feedback from tutors on what they thought was suitable for the type of captain I was aiming for. With they’re feedback in mind, I chose to not use the darker coloured variants because they read as a more sinister and evil captain which I wasn’t going for. This left the lighter toned palettes as my main options.

From those colour variations, I ended up choosing the last option. It was a bit more muted in colour which made it seem as though the robot was older and had been used more, but it also still had the sections of colour which made it visibly striking. To add to this, the details of the graffiti on the body signified to some storytelling aspects to the character (whether the robot marked itself or something else did It I’m not too sure). 

Having picked which colour scheme I was going to use, I could start moving forward to the final stages of the character- the final render.

Captain Character Project #4

 

With my robot captain, I chose 2 silhouettes that I thought I could create some decent deign variations from. After getting feedback and opinions from tutors I chose a silhouette that had a more square stature and one with a much more round stature.

I started iterating based on what I’d learnt from my exploration sketches. I kept in mind trying not to overwhelm the design as a whole with too much going on at all times, but it was very easy to get carried away with sketching hard surfaces. I also kept in mind adding elements of A-symmetry although I knew this could be brought in with colour so it wasn’t my immediate concern.

I created 3 variations of each silhouette, trying to really change up how the whole robot is structed in each design whilst still abiding by the silhouette. I feel as though the square robot is closer to how I envision a robot captain to be. I do like the round robot and I really like the second design but I felt that the overall shape was a bit too exaggerated for its purpose- no matter the design it all read as a bit too cartoon-ish for my liking. The square robot had an element of intimidation from its designs which was what I wanted. Out of those 3 I quite like the first one because it read as a bit more of a composed captain that can definitely be a perfect weapon but also be in control of itself. The other two designs felt more unhinged which I didn’t want the captain to be.

From this I’ll play around with some values and start creating iterations of the design in colour.

Captain Concept Project #3

 

As a precaution with my robot character, instead of diving further with my iterations, I thought more on how I wanted to make up my captain and what kind of intricacies I could include in my design. I sketched out some body part designs for the arm and leg to give myself a better understanding on what and how parts can be functional but also interesting to look at.

Breaking down the forms and applying various shapes was really helpful for seeing what would work and what wouldn’t on a robot. I learned that typically when an object makes sense functionality wise then it’ll typically look nicest as well. Having lots of wires and rivets to make up a joint is interesting in some regard but it overwhelms the overall structure since if that portion has so much going on in it then everything else on the character would need to have that same level of detail and that would be too much.

 

With this I decided to make my robot more on the ‘clean’ side as in it’d have panels and large metal portions covering the majority of it with the complex mechanical parts showing through only smaller portions. I’ll still play around with varying levels of detail though when iterating in more detail.

Captain Concept Project #2

 

Continuing with my robot captain, I began iterating though silhouettes. With these silhouettes, I was really focused on the main focal shape of each robot. I felt like focusing on too many shapes at once would make things messy quickly and since I was approaching this slowly, that would be a bit detrimental for my progress. I essentially assigned one major shape to each silhouette and then played off that for the whole design just to see if I was able to get down a recognizable humanoid form.

Some silhouettes were more successful than others, in some the shapes ended up being too clunky and it made the read confusing. The bottom row of silhouettes seemed to be the best outcome in my opinion as I felt there’s a lot there that I can play around with when developing them further.

Captain Concept Project #1

 

For my second project, I wanted to tackle a concept art brief to really solidify my artistic fundamentals alongside my 3D work. I chose to follow the same Captain Character brief as I am for my 3D but to handle it for the concept perspective.

I’d considered creating a character somewhat similar to my 3D project (in the same vein as like a military captain) or going the more basic route of creating a pirate captain, but then thought that in order to really test my range of character creation, why not make a captain that’s more outer worldly? With this I landed on the idea of making a robot rebellion captain. The angle I aimed to push this character towards was a robot that’d gained sentience and was rebelling against humans. It’d formed a gang of robots and it stood as the captain of said gang.

With this I immediately started gathering up references and creating a moodboard on PureRef and Pinterest simultaneously. Creating robots isn’t necessarily something I do a lot so the thought process of iterating designs for this topic is a bit foreign to me, so reference was key for this project. Robots seem so intricate in their designs because there are so many directions you can push them. They can look more clean and humanoid in stature like Gundams or Transformers or be completely abstract like a robot for Wall-E. I need to do quite a lot of thinking to get a better idea of how to push my character in a direction that will make sense.

Ubisoft Character Project #5

 

Back with my captain’s sculpt, I added the hood fur to the jacket. It was a similar method to how I created the hair (many tubes) but it was a bit finicky to work around the shape and keep it all looking neat. The main shape ended up looking fine though from all angles so I can go back and add polish as and when I see fit. I also started on the trousers as well. They would only go up to the knees as the boots would be knee highs so it wasn’t too complex approaching this portion the sculpt.

 

Mainly however, I sculpted the actual pilot helmet and goggles. I was a bit torn on how much actual detail I should sculpt into the helmet and what I should just leave for the textures. I thought maybe I should sculpt in things like stitches and then bake them on the low-poly but I figured although that might look nice and detailed, it might be too much with the style I’m aiming for. My sculpt seems to play big on large shapes so adding small details like that might seems almost too realistic for this stylized character. Maybe there’s a way to make it work but I wasn’t really finding it so focused on getting the main obvious silhouette of the helmet and goggles above all else.