Character - Overview
It was unexpected for me that this character will be the main key of my winning. It is good that I focused a lot by doing this character in terms of modeling, texturing and rendering.
In fact to create this guy, I faced a big challenge during the process. I encounter so much frustration about how to finalize the pose. I did many trials before I came up with this one.
This is the two figures demonstrating the technique that was used for modeling this guy.
First, a simple base mesh was created from a camera projection with a picture reference attached. After Building the base mesh, I did a smooth operation for the mesh to be ready to use as a canvas in order to draw the curves on it.
But in order to draw the curves on the surface you need to make it “live” to be able to magnetize your curves.
Tips:
Minimal curves with a lower value of points will make your life easier when doing the Bi-rail operation. Make sure every single curve has the same number of point to keep it quads. Just follow the theory of patch modeling.
After building all the curves, nubs surfaces was established, then converting one by one all the pieces into polygon for mesh flow refinement.
Tips: Before you mirror, it is better to establish all the uv’s of all the pieces.
These are the rest of the elements to complete the character.
Basically the shapes was initially drawn by curves to accurately bound the edges. That was the method which is used for
modeling the entire scene.
Rider - Sculpting
Here are the images of sculpting character in ZBrush. As you can see the main body has one piece of mesh.
First, I attached all the pieces and rigged the character in Maya, then figure out the pose that I wanted before exporting it to obj. for sculpting. After sculpting I used Zmapper to establish the silhouette which was used as normal map to displace the character.
Since I knew that I have uv’s layout I simply managed to detach again all the pieces to separate them by selecting faces from uv’s editor.
