Devlog: Sculpting character process

On Day 1 I created the base model for the female characters from an existing character I had. I made the head bigger and waist smaller to look more stylized. I was following the design of Elizabeth from Bioshock mostly.

I was going to first do the plain body's for each character but I forgot to bring my hard-drive. So I continued working on the female character, Julie. I changed her body proportions again since I thought it wasn't stylized enough. And I mostly completed the sculpt it just needs extra polish now.

Julies face

Day 3

Daniel Blocking done, still needs shoes.

  Day 4 Vernon

Day 5 Shirley

Worked on Shirleys sculpt. I took Julie's body and edited the face. I used Marvelous designer to quickly get a dress base to work from in Z brush.

I worked on Shirley and at the end of the class she looked like this:

But I decided work on her more when I got home. I tweaked her face now her eyes aren't as big and far apart which made her slightly alien looking. I'll tweak Julie's slightly since her eyes were similar. And I sculpted her hair much more. I think her facial proportions are much better now and because I took her body base from Julie I think I should revisit Julie's face as well.

Shirley now:

I wanted her hair to look neat and swirly from all angles. 

  Also detailed her hands so her highpoly is basically done, maybe just a few tweaks can be done before I start retopologizing every character.

WEEK  3 _ Sculpting, Beginning retopology 

 I touched up all character's high poly to make sure details are there when I bake them. Especially Julie, where I added a sash . I also used marvelous to make her dress just to add a couple of extra folds and wrinkles. This type of tight dress doesn't really get very wrinkled though.

Week 4

Finished topologizing the 4 main suspects. At the moment their poly count is all around 21- 22 k. Still can reduce these poly counts a bit so the game can run smoothly. May need to create LODs as well but at the moment the environment is pretty small. 

Pics of wireframes:

Week5

Making NPC's. NPC's need a couple variants but I'll be using the same rig for males and females respectively so I can import less files. 

I also made the eyes of the characters more detailed with the models to give depth. So there is a cornea model overlayed on the schelra/iris. But reduced poly's in other places.

Put the characters into substance painter and baked the high poly to low poly but may add more details.

Week 6 rigging:

I started rigging Monday, The rigging may take longer than I scheduled for but my team already knows. It was a tight schedule and I under-estimated the task a bit. I have been doing after class hours to make up for it. I did have issues while painting weights , Maya seemed to be redistributing weight influences by itself. It was a tedious process but I managed it so the weight painting is finished for the characters including facial rigs put in. For expressions I'll use blendshapes. 

I began texturing the characters.

Week 7 Textures:

Over the weekend I finished the main characters textures. Need to do the NPC's next including their rigs.

 Week 7 Animation:

Working on animation idles today. After the idles I will make 180 turning animations for the characters. 

I tried to import some animation to unity to check it out but the animation won't play on the rig. The thing I did different this time was animate from a referenced rig so I wouldn't break the rig just in case. But this might be a problem that I have to look into. 

 Example of animation.  In Unity I need to set it up to make their heads follow to look at the player as well.

  I also made the irises of Shirley and Vernon smaller in the textures to expose more white in their eyes. Because I asked for feedback about their looks and Shirley was found to be a bit creepy. And Vernon's eyes too big or anime like. 

End of week log:

Having trouble getting humanoid animations to work in Unity. Got some help, apparently it's because I have the wrong naming conventions due to me referencing the rig in maya. I can't delete the namespace maya puts on the file. At the moment I'm put behind a bit but I at least know what the problem is before I resume animating.

Week 8: continued in next log.