Yr3 Week 5: Modelling the character

Unfortunately this week was a bit of a rush - I had to go back home halfway through the week for an emergency appointment and ended up quite behind and not where I wanted to be, meaning I'm around 3 days behind where I would like to be as of now, but these things happen and I will have to put more time into the project to catch up now. Because of this, this weeks post is relatively small!

I started the project by making a base mesh for the character, I decided to make an entirely new one even though I have made some in previous years, as I feel like it is always good practice and a good way to improve. The base mesh was made quite quickly, as I have planned to have my character covered almost entirely in clothing meaning that not very much skin will be showing.

I used Marvellous Designer to create the majority of the clothes in this project, excluding the boots, belt and backpack which were made in 3DS Max and then modified in Zbrush. I only have very small experience with Marvellous Designer so far, so trying to get the clothes to do what I wanted was a little difficult and took a lot of trial and error. I also had many problems with Marvellous Designer not liking my base mesh and hanging strangely off of it - something that hasn't happened to me before, and I wasn't actually able to find a solution to this. In the end I used the standard Marvellous Designer avatar and made my designs over the top of this, I then afterwards manipulated them in zbrush to fit my character accordingly.

I made trousers also in marvellous designer, and created hair in zbrush using claytubes. After I had finished the main details of the clothes I decimated the mesh and imported it back to max, so that I had a base to create my other assets and accessories around more easily and already had low poly versions of the assets speeding up the baking process.

Below is the final sculpt in zbrush, ready to be re-topologised and unwrapped next week.

I am hoping that I will be able to finish the character next week even with my delays. I am hoping to fully hand-paint the character and then take it into substance painter to add PBR materials to it and add more to the style I am hoping to achieve.