Making of Guerriero
by John Martini, USA Web: www.JokerMartini.com

guerriero

Concept

For my concept on this character I just wanted to do a mix of a Gears of War/Unreal and Starcraft. I had a basic idea in my head when I began modeling the character. As I went along I changed and added things to the character. I implemented ideas into the model that were interesting to me from various characters I see in games today. I had to keep in mind that what I chose to put on the character had to be consistent throughout the entire thing. Right from the beginning I wanted to create a segmented character. A segmented character means that the character is made up of several different objects. This means that both the arms are combined to make one object. Both boots are one object. The thighs are one object. The torso is also a separate object and lastly the head is a separate object, and the shoulder pads are separate as well. The entire character is made up of 6 separate objects.

Name Choice

For those who don’t know Italian, the word Guerriero is an Italian word that means “Warrior”. I’m Italian and I wanted to give him a strong Italian name and that’s why I choose it. I like to use Italian words for several of my art pieces.

Modeling the Head

I used the plane by plane/edge extruding technique to model the head. I modeled the head in 3ds max. I wanted to keep the head around 1200 polygons and keep it in quads as well. I did this so when I subdivided in Zbrush the divisions were more even, rather than subdividing tris. I try to stay away from subdividing any tris in Zbrush. In the past I’ve had problems with tris. The head of the character is based off of Dominic Purcell. He is the older brother in the tv series Prison Break. I liked he facial structure. I used reference pictures of him to model my head in max.

Sculpting the Head

When I sculpted the head I first laid out the form in the first level of subdivision. I used a black and white image similar to a bump map to mask out areas on the head to apply deformation to the head. I used this to create facial hair, the eye brows, and the hair.

Modeling the Body

At this stage I began blocking out the models main volume and forms. I used a base human model I had for reference on the proportions. I modeled this character in 3ds Max. I used a mix of box modeling and plane by plane modeling. I constantly checked the characters silhouette to make sure the bulkiness and weight were staying consistent throughout the entire character. To do this I just added a flat black standard shader to the character and made the self-illumination 100% black. Since this was a game character I set my poly limit roughly around 10,000 give or take a thousand. A couple characters in the new Unreal are around 15,000 but the majority is around 10,000. I ended up with 5,324 polys, which is 9,948 tris. Considering this is a game character, every poly is important. For example if you look at the arms on the character, they are one solid piece. There are no elements within the object. You can look at the picture and see the armor is built right off of the arm. This is a bit difficult because if I were to make a high poly character I would build the arm separate and then build the armor around it. Since its one piece, the edge flow of the polys is very important.





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