Week 7- Wilderness Warrior Project

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At the end of the previous project I was stuck as to what to pick for my final 3 week project. Having chosen 2 character projects I wanted to produce at least one series of environments, so I looked into the isometric environment brief, and the epic cityscapes brief. I feel like i'd choose the epic cities if I did not need to house them in the 1700’s. So I started planning with the intent of completing the Isometric level brief. However I could not think of a clear direction to go with that project, I couldn’t visualize an end product, an issue that I had experienced in my Leyendecker Vikings project, which hindered me overall. So I went back to the drawing board. Both briefs are challenging, but with the quantity of work needed to complete the brief, I didn’t think it would be wise for me to do, as I’m not particularly confident with my environment work. As id already had a setback with my leyender vikings project I figured it would be best not to throw myself in the deep end too much for this project.

That being said I still want to develop my skills as, I’d felt like I stopped learning new things (at least at the rate that I feel like i'm supposed to learn new things) With that in mind I decided to tackle another skill that I’ve been putting off learning, 3D sculpting. I’d been avoiding 3D for these projects but felt like it was time to get back into it, as I’d finished previous 2D projects with the desire to model my characters up in 3D. After looking through the briefs I settled on the Wilderness Warrior brief. To give myself enough time to learn how to sculpt I decided to take an older character of mine and merge them into the concept provided for the project, this gave me a clear end product that I could visualize working well.

My goals for this project are to:

• Learn have to sculpt in 3d coat and use this mesh as a base mesh 
• Learn how to effectively bake down my sculpt to use in a diffuse texture 
• Have a fully rigged, game ready, posed and presented character 

My Timetable:




For concepting I started by merging my existing character with the concepts provided, I then explored colour pallets, taking inspiration from the seasons and the buyu from The Princess and the Frog movie, for a swamp pallet. From there I picked my top 6 to develop further, then my top 3. I am currently working towards the Autumn design for my character. Though I still like the look of my winter character, so I may test them both out later down the line.

Then I went straight to sculpting. Learning to Sculpt a base mesh for my models is something I’ve wanted to learn how to do for a while, so I chose this project to experiment with, with going back to modeling in 3ds max as an option if things go badly. One of the reasons I did not want to sculpt before this is that I found Zbrush interface difficult to get around. Though I’m still working through that, in the meantime I'm using 3d coat. 3D Coat is a programme that I'm more familiar with, having retopologized and textured with it in previous projects.







Mid week I ended up with this base sculpt:

.From there I followed topology reference, painted some guides onto my mesh and began my retopolgy.

I opted to manually re-topologize this mesh due to its low poly nature. I felt that I’d need as much control as possible over the topology especially when it came to modeling in deformation points. Everything is going well so far, I have a clear concept and an almost finished model based on a sculpt that I can bake down later on.

My goals for the end of next week are:

• Finish retopologizing my model
• Unwrap model ready for texturing
• Sculpt in extra details to bake down into the base mesh
• Be well on my way with texturing.