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Project Beginings
For this project I wanted to try and create a 3D character rig suitable for TV or social media production. Basing the design of a character from one of the protagonists from my comic Recombinant.
The final deliverable for this project will be this character fully rigged and usable for portfolio animations, social posts (Insta/Tik Tok/YouTube) and the potential also for it to be used for an animated pilot later down the line.
Planned timeline for the project
Prior to the semester I started with developing their design. Creating a pure ref board, doing some concept sketches and blockout.
I used the pure ref to collect not just reference images but also helpful rigging and modelling references.
Once I had references collected I started working on a few rigging tests and the concept art.
Here are some early blockouts of the character in zbrush, the first 3 weeks of semester consisted of me just iterating on the design to get it as high quality as I could.
First rough blockout
Ill also started making some blog/social content videos on my progress as I go!
Semester Starts!
From the discord blog:
Update 8/3: Got some good progress on the main blocking out of the body. I squished the torso down a bit and I think it really suits the character alot better. The side profile still bugs me a little bit but im unsure where the issue is (ill have to have a think on it). Since the model wont be highly detailed/mainly painted in substance I will be likely moving to clothing modeling soon. Ive booked in a mentor sesh with one of the 3D mentors for this week and im hoping that I can get some good constructive feedback on the model.
Update 15/3
Started getting into the body modelling today, took me ages to figure out how to merge it all without destroying all my geo but we got there! I will likely have to go through and sharpen a few of the edges to make sure that im staying close to my ref.
Final Character model!
Weeks 4 - 5 - Creating the clothing
23/3/26 Discord Update: Started the rough block-out of the clothing today!
Week 5 - Completed outfit!
Honestly i was a bit unsure if i would be able to finish it in the 2 weeks, but I managed to get it all done! Really happy on how it came out, and excited to start getting this character into retopology.
Starting some of the retopology on the hands. I decided to start here as I struggled alot getting the topology right on the hands/feet on my last character and decided to just bite the bullet and focus on it first.
Week 7 - Retopology of the body was completed!
This was arguably the longest and most tedius part, but Im quite happy with how the body came out. I think it took roughly about 30ish hours. Next week I will be doing the clothing retopology, so unfortunately they are naked for the moment.
Week 8 - Clothing retopology (mostly) done.
Completed the retopology of the clothing, not super happy with how the vest was done so im going to take it to the mentors and see if they can offer some advice. I also adjusted the time line since I wont be doing much rigging for this project, and to give me more time for retopology.
Week 9 - Oh god UVing was so much quicker than retopologising.
I think in total I spent around 3 hours doing all of the UV's for this projects and the base character is now done. Ill be planning on taking them to texturing by the end of this week. Since this is something that I want to take into photoshop to hand paint some of the textures after substance I made a deliberate effort on the body uvs to put them into a readable order.
This video was super useful in helping me setting out the UV's correctly. I also checked out these videos as well for reference.
Week 10 - Clean-up week
This week I sent some time tiding up the UV's and adjusting some of the topology of my character. This consisted of fixing texel density, topology, fixing the shape of the tights and increasing the size of the character.
Fixing characters size: they were a bit small when imorted in from zbrush so i just scaled them up by 10.3.
Fixing characters clothing: fixing pants silohette
Week 10/11 - Bringing them into substance painter
Brought the character into substance to texture. This phase was fairly easy as the character has very simple block colours to keep with their cartoony aesthetic.
First pass on texturing (no secondary detailing).
Also there was no way that I would have overlapping uv's... absolutely not...
Secondary detailing added/blue tint.
Week 11 - Back to Maya
Brought the scout back into Maya and applied their textures. Also moddeled up some eyes and had a bit of fun doing a rough rig set up for them. This was set up using aim constraints and a nurbs curve.
Week 12 - Chaos, nonsense and first poses
At request of Jason I had a go at setting up the character with a mixamo animation. The base animations were... interesting to say the least. I did attempt to make one look somewhat normal however even with mocap cleanup it still gave an uncanny look. This clean up caused the model to have a few weird glitches since I had to directly edit their bones/re-attach their eyes. What i did find really interesting was that mixamo was able to identify that the character only had 3 fingers and a thumb which I thought was a neat detail!
Though I didn't really end up using a mixamo animation for the final submission, I did use one to act as a pose base! This made things like foot positions easier to set up.
Week 12 - Final Pose
This was my first pass at doing a pose for the character, honestly really happy how they have come up! I'm thinking ill do a few tweaks before final submission, but yeah we are on the home stretch now!
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