Ubisoft Character Project ~ Post 1

Budget:
15,000 Triangles
1 x 1024 x 1024 D, N, S
1 x 512 x 512 D, N, S (for the head)
1 x 512 x 512 Alpha (if required)
Programs Used:
3DS Max 2014
Adobe Photoshop CS2

We were set a character brief by Ubisoft, to design, model and texture a female warrior from a different culture like China, Japan, India and Africa for example. Wanting to specialise in Environment Art, I find characters quite difficult to get my head around and create. My character projects in the past have completely let me down and I haven’t really been happy with any of them. This project, I am going to give it my all and try my very best to create something I am pleased to show.

I must admit I was a little disappointed with being given a female character to create, because of the Mortal Engines project last year where we had to create ourselves, and with me being female and creating a scavenger/raider type character, I think that this brief is maybe a bit too similar. To make my project different, I have chosen to make an overweight character, this will be a lot more interesting to model and as far as I am aware, it isn’t an obvious choice so there wont be many similar characters in the class. My character will be a Chinese Empress who used to be a warrior until she married into wealth, now she as grown old, fat and slobbish. She will be wearing traditional Chinese clothing, including the head-piece, and be sat lazily on a throne.

I started this project by making a concept, I couldn’t find any anatomical diagrams of an overweight lady, so I had to make my own. Using this I then painted over it to work out what my character would look like naked, doing this I could work out properly what her body shape would be. I made a few line drawings over a quick 3D mock up that I made so that I could have an understanding of what different outfits would look like from references. Then I decided on the parts of the outfits that I liked and created a final concept. I am actually very happy with my concept, I think that my lady has definite character and is portraying the look I initially imagined. Once I have made and textured my 3D version of my character, I may add some more detail to the clothing, such as flowers or dragons on the clothing itself.
The fact that I had made a proper concept for my character made it a lot easier for me to start building my model. I used a few cylinders, (making them see-through so that I could see my concept) and just kept rescaling them until they were around about the correct shape. I kept everything mirrored and the face was definitely the most challenging part of the build. I spent a lot of time trying to get it to look right, I think that the face is definitely one of the most important parts of this character, I need to be able to portray the age and grumpy facial expression within the mesh.

 I actually followed a tutorial about how to correctly build hands in 3D, hands are very difficult and I have always struggled to be able to build nice looking hands. I managed to build a finger that I liked the look of, so I just copied it and resized it for the rest of the hand.

Creating the hair in 3D was quite difficult, as I had only concepted from the front, I hadn’t fully figured out what the sides and back would look like. This was a mistake that could have been avoided if I had made more concepts from different angles, but I don’t like concepting and wanted to get to building quite quickly, I can learn from this mistake in the future though. Either way, I figured it out, even if this took me a bit longer than it should have done, I am pleased with it. I decided against the little round plaits poking out of the sides that are on my concept, I feel that they weren’t really needed and would probably look messy against the elaborate headpiece.
Once my character was finished to a good standard, I attached both mirrored sides together and made it less symmetrical, putting more detail into the face and clothing.

The unwrapping was an absolute pain as per usual, I used all of the different techniques that I know for unwrapping and it still took an annoyingly long amount of time. This is part of the reason why I dislike making characters so much, they are unnecessarily difficult to unwrap and I am actually dreading when I have to rig this, rigging is possibly even more annoying than unwrapping. Anyway I was glad to see that there was allowances to put the face unwrap on a separate UV map to the body, this allows for more texture detail for both the head and the body, which is great. I put all of the skin coloured parts together on one map, and the little accessories, most of the hair and the clothes are together on a different map, and the rest of the hair and some other parts are going on an alpha map. I’m surprised how tidy I managed to get my UV maps, I feel that the placing of the unwrapped items on the maps normally let me down, but this time I feel that I have been quite tidy.
Creating the textures themselves wasn’t too challenging, the fact that I had figured out the colour scheme in my concept made it a lot easier for me to texture. I colour picked a lot from my concept and just painted over the UV map that I had rendered out from 3DS Max. Eventually I decided to add more detail to the clothes, my lady is Chinese so I decided to add some Chinese patterns to the clothing, like flowers, dragons and symbols. I find it a lot easier to use Photoshop now that I have a graphics tablet, it’s silly how much just a small change  has improved my work dramatically. This is the first character I have used a graphics tablet to texture with, it is also the first character that I have completely painted myself. I used some of the tools in Photoshop to add a embroidery texture to some of my images to make them look like they’ve been sewn onto the woman’s garments.