Devlog 3 - Character Creation

For this phase of production, I've been working on making a final character model for our game. Currently, we have a temporary one that we used for playtests, but animating with it hasn't been very smooth, and it also doesn't convey our theme as well. So I've been working, during this phase, on a model that can replace our current one.

I started by making a rough turnaround that would guide my sculpting process. I didn't follow it to a tee, as it was more meant for me to loosely use as a guide while sculpting.

After I made the turnaround, I move over to blender to start sculpting the character. I generally prefer to sculpt in ZBrush, but I used blender as I can only use ZBrush on school computers, and this was done during reading week. Sculpting when reasonably fast, as this is a pretty simple character. When I was done, I was left with this model:

I shared this with my team and they were all happy with it. Once it was done, I moved on to the retopology stage. 

For retopology, I used Blender's built-in quad remesh function for the hair and clothes, as the topology of those objects was not as important as the body's. For the body though, I moved in to maya, whose retopology tools I am more familiar with, and used the quad draw tool. This step was quite tedious, and took a while, but by the end of reading and design week, I was done. At this point, the model looked like this:

Normally, in the character creation pipeline, the next steps after this would be UV unwrapping, baking and texturing. But after communicating with my team, we decided to stop here, as this level of detail was gonna be enough for the needs of our project. We planned to use unity materials, so a UV unwrap wasn't needed, and the retopology resembled the original model enough that baking wasn't necessary. This meant that rigging was next.

I was able to make a rig from scratch for the character (which honestly wasn't really necessary, but I wanted to use it as an opportunity to practice rigging). Now I'm currently working on weight painting, and once that's done, I'll be able to make animations that'll be used in game.  Hopefully, by the end of this week, the character will be fully done, and will be in game.