Concept
Original concept and character design by Hennie Blaauw, Yggdrasil Gaming.
I had the opportunity to work on one of Yggdrasil Gaming's new online games, who's main characters are these rather cute, whimsical looking things. The concept artist for these creatures is the talented Hennie Blaauw, who is the game art manager at Yggdrasil Gaming.
My role for this job was that of character sculptor/modeler/texture artist. The timeline was rather tight, but in the end we managed to pull it off in the few days that we had. After my part in the process was completed, some of the very talented artists at BlackGinger took over with regards to animation, shading, lighting and VFX.
Sculpting
Sculpting the Chibeastie. Orthographic views from ZBrush.
My first step was to immediately jump into ZBrush and start fleshing out the look of the character, based off of the initial 2D concept, in 3D space. This really is a personal workflow, but I prefer to work to a 'retopo' approach. My reason for this is that it allows me to keep things loose in the beginning, experiment with form quickly and easily, and explore various options - things I would find far more challenging to do if I started off with a more conventional box-modeling approach.
In Zbrush, using dynamesh, I quickly rough out the form and spend as much time as I can refining the look from all angles. At regular intervals, I would send off ZBrush renders for Hennie to look at, who would then draw in corrections to the form that he would prefer. This proved incredibly helpful, and made the process that much faster. After a very short time, we had the character design in 3D space approved.
Retopologising
Modeling phase, done in MODO.
From here the focus is on turning the approved sculpt into a production ready asset. The topology and the density of the sculpt is both unusable and far too dense to proceed with. To begin the retopologising process, I exported the sculpt out of ZBrush and brought it into MODO, where a far more simplified mesh is made.
After this is done, the mesh is unwrapped and then taken back into ZBrush where the details of the original sculpt is projected back onto the new simplified mesh. The displacement maps are then exported for the new mesh, wrapping up the retopologisng process
After this is done, the mesh is unwrapped and then taken back into ZBrush where the details of the original sculpt is projected back onto the new simplified mesh. The displacement maps are then exported for the new mesh, wrapping up the retopologisng process
Texturing
Texture painting done in Mari, viewport renders shown.
All the texturing was done in Mari, the preferred software tool for both myself and BlackGinger. Fortunately Mari offers fantastic tools for texturing while also allowing artists to better visualize what the final shaded result could potentially look like under realistic lighting conditions. This obviously made the process so much quicker and easier.
Rendering
Final renders with full SSS shaders for Chibeastie's skin.
My final step is to shade, light and render the character for the purpose of the turntable. It is important to note this step does not represent any of the work done at BlackGinger, instead it is purely my own attempt at realising the final look of the character.
For the skin, I used a SSS shader with individual maps for the surface, mid and deep scatter values, tweaking the values slightly until I am happy with the overall look. Since the character is not all that complicated, there really isn't much more to the process.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I do hope you have enjoyed this brief breakdown!
