Making NPCs
This week Benny proved some designs for the NPCs that will appear in the village, so I spent the week making models for these NPCs. There were 6 NPCs in total, however I knew they wouldn’t be too difficult to model as they all share similar features which meant that I could just duplicate certain parts such as the masks.
(Credit to Benny for the NPC concepts)
I started off with the cloak. For this I used a cylinder and positioned the vertices to match the shape of the cloak in the concept art. I then extruded the faces at the bottom to create the hollow inside. For the small opening at the bottom I used the multi-cut tool to cut out the triangle shape and deleted the faces. For the second layer at the top of the cloak I used a sphere and deleted the lower half of it. I then adjusted the shape by moving the vertices to match the concept art. Since the NPCs weren’t going to be animated, I didn’t bother modelling a body as the cloak would have covered them anyways.
Next I worked on the head. For this I used a cylinder for the neck and then placed a sphere on top of it. I then modelled the mask by turning the head into a live object and using the quad-draw tool to allow the mask to follow the curve of the head. I also had symmetry turned on while doing this so that the eye shape was the same on both sides of the mask.
For the beak I used a cone that was cut in half and then adjusted the vertices to create the beak shape.
I then modelled the hood. Since the quad-draw tool worked well for the mask, I decided to try it again for the hood as this would allow me to recreate the creases in the hood and also allow me to create a hollow shape. To do this I created a sphere and sculpted it to match the shape of the hood on the concept art. I then used the quad-draw tool over this shape to create the shape of the hood.
I used a similar technique for the shoes by blocking out a rough shape of the shoes using a a cylinder and a cube. I then used the quad-draw tool to create the final design of the shoe. For the legs I used cylinders and then used the multi-cut tool to add more edge-loops to allow me to change the shape to match the trousers in the concept designs.
All that was left to do was to model the hair. I had no idea where to start for the hair, but I found the following tutorial that was a great help:
With this tutorial I was able to model the hair I wanted using low-poly cylinders and extruding the vertices. Once the different parts of hair were finished, I then adjusted them to follow the curve of the head.
Once I had the NPC finished, I worked on the UV maps.
I then repeated this process for all the other NPCs. Thankfully this didn’t take as long since many elements such as the cloak, mask and shoes could just be re-used for each model. Overall I’m very happy with how the NPCs turned out and I plan to texture them soon.
