UnlimitedBarnpunk: Character Design

Update 07.03.14

This week I have also been designing some extra characters for the game, as well as animating the alien. I have decided to start to focus on the male character first.

These are the basic concepts of what the prisoners may look like, or how they may be presented. The lack of clothes makes them look less cared for and more disposable, this is the effect I am aiming for. Another thing to consider is how tall they will be, and how they will stand i.e. they wouldn't move much being locked up and also wouldn't gain much muscle mass.

I did some more anatomy studies to help me to design out my humanoid styled characters, the prisoners would be mostly either over weight due to them being used as alien food. The underweight suggestion will be considered to relate to not being cared for as much so would create that effect. Possibly dirty faces, and filthy ripped clothes, if any at all.

Update 14.03.14

This week I began to produce the male prisoner,

using a base mesh I started to bring out the forms of the human (male) anatomy. Referring back to studies I blocked in detail of the major muscles into the character. This is a really quick method to creating a human character sculpt but I still had to add the extra muscle deformation to the model.

Using a previous design I created a face for the male character, the character itself being in its mid 40s that assists the player in the game. All of its details are adding in the deformation of the character and any other details will be added in the texturing process. I happy with the look of the character, its not too interesting that it takes away all the other game art but its enough for it to be obviously a human that you can interact with.

After all the main details were added I took the model into Maya and started to add some clothes and other assets to the character. The clothes themselves are based off of old medieval rags/tunics. The aliens that are harvesting the humans won't care about whether or not they have clothes on, so as a response their clothing will be minimal if any. However the rags/tunics are being used to show that they still have some sort of control being within the confounds of the cages. I decided this would be most appropriate as the humans would have any kind of fancy or clean clothes in the confides of the musky dirty cages.

Once the clothes were made in a low poly form I took them into Z-Brush to adjust them to sit over the top of the human mesh. I decided to go for a bumpy clothing style over the top to show that it is uncomfortable material that just sits over the person. Below are some screenshots of it in Z-Brush when I pulled the cloth over the top of the male sculpt.

These are the reference images I used when designing the clothes a lot, of them are from Skyrim. The reason being is that they are the types of clothes that I wanted to suit the character.

I then went on the design the hair for the character, using planes I layed out over around the head area, so that I could use an alpha map to co-ordinate more detail into the hair.

I layed out the planes to fit around the shape of the head, and varied with style and size of each of the planes to give it some variation. I started to use the quad draw to jot down different areas with planes to fit the direction of the growth in the hair. Once I got something that fit around certain areas of the head I would copy and reuse some of the same polys.

Once all of the polys were layered out around the head area, I us

ed a hair texture I created and adjusted the UV's of each of the planes to suit the style of the hair to each of the planes. The top texture is the alpha map which I used to get the opacity right and the sizes of the hair to go in the right direction, and the bottom one is a diffuse map that was used as the texture.

Update 17.03.14

Once the hair was finished I added in some spheres for the eyes and checked to see if all the extra bits fitted in with the character model. I also added some extra detail to the torso and the feet of the character. The top two images are the high poly versions, one with clothes and the other without.

The two images underneath are low poly models, in which I adjusted the UV sets around and also I created a UV set for the Tunic and the Bottoms so it can use the same texture.

Update 21.03.14

This week I managed to UV unwrap the character, and its clothing, using Z-Brush and its unwrap tool. I then baked the high poly mesh onto the low poly achieving some nice quality effects with the normal map. This week I also textured the male prisoner, using a very quick and simple texture to slap onto the character to put into the game to test out. The textures however seemed to work quite well. The skin texture was just one image used across the whole character, but when combined with the normal map it looks realistic.

These two images are comparing sizes to the alien: the top one is set to 0.02, and the bottom one is set to 0.03. These are measurements to the original size (1), however the size will most probably be re-made at a later stage. As you can see from the two images underneath the Normal map and the texture have turned out to work quite well. As for the image at the bottom (which is the model with clothes on and with a quick texture), seems to work well for a quick texturing job, obviously will be altered at a later date but for now the colour scheme and style works.

Update 04.04.14

I have been adding extras to the human texture such as scars and skin tone variation, the skin looked a bit too flat, so I decided to add some scars into the character. I found a image online of a person with scars and bruises, so referring back to how the skin is coloured I colour-picked and added in similar effects onto the character itself.

The finished character:

The male prisoner came out with pretty standard textures however they were a little tricky to get into unity because of I didn't propers combine the model before exporting it so the .fbx tried to carry across the layers which has become a big problems. However the male prisoner is an NPC that helps out the player at the start of the game by giving advice on how to escape.

With the help of dDo I was able to add some pretty decent textures to the model to give it some stylisation and natural looks to the materials and the skin. I added in extra details such as cuts to make the character look more believable and with the use of a specular I was able to make it look wet and shiny as if the cut is fairly new. The normal maps helped out by by adding detail to the texture of the clothing by making it look as if it is made from woven material.