Another unfinished texture. I still don’t have a firm grip on this style. Maybe I need to do a background before I can figure it out.
I’ve been working on shaders a bit today. Without a Unity pro license, I can’t have cast shadows, so I’m trying to do something that doesn’t have much shading but can still break up the shapes.
There are three parts to this. A color which tints the object to match the environment’s lighting. A rim light that isn’t actually cast by a light so that it just follows the camera around. And some very subtle shading on the undersides of the objects.
I’ll have a better idea of how well this works once I get a finished character and environment done.
When I don’t have anything new to show, I’m going to start posting old artwork like this guy. He’s from a game design that I was fooling around with called “What is Rugby?” The game itself was a somewhat sillier take on sports franchise management games, but the premise was that aliens invaded Earth and challenged the US president to a game of rugby union to determine the fate of the world.
This is the wireframe for the realtime Michael Fassbender bust that I posted earlier. It was made from the high resolution sculpt using ZBrush’s QRemesher tools, then reduced a bit further and cleaned up in Softimage.
It’s just under 5000 triangles, which makes it maybe a bit over budget for a next console generation character model, depending on the game, of course. Although I didn’t make it with actual game use in mind, I did try to put the points and edges in places that would be useful for animation. If I were to finish this for a game, the forehead and brow would get a lot more triangles, while the shoulder girdle area would have a lot less.
This is a screenshot from Softimage of the model that I’m working on right now. It’s going to be a base mesh that I’ll use to quickly make characters in this style.
The version on the left is a simple prototype made mostly out of cylinders and spheres. These primitives are organized into a hierarchy very similar to an animation rig so that I can quickly change the pose or move and scale limbs to get the shapes just right. A bonus from working this way is that when I actually create the animation rig for characters using this mesh, I can just put the joints in the middle of the spheres to get nice deformations.
After finishing the prototype, I started working on the final mesh on the right. Because I had all of those primitives from the first step, I’m mostly just filling in the holes at the joints.
The hands and head are still just prototypes because I haven’t decided how to handle them yet. I’ll probably take the head into ZBrush and make a single mesh out of the ears, nose, and head “bean” using Dynamesh. After a little sculpting, I’ll retopologize with QRemesher and probably just use that mesh as it is.
