Ghost character
This week I worked on one of the two character models for our game. This was very time consuming so I did not managed to do much else however I am very happy with how the ghost is looking.
I began by looking at the character concept art created by Archie in my group. We had already as a group decided upon which design we would use. Below is their concepts. Number 9 is the look we want.
After studying this, I imported it into Maya and began modelling. I started with the skull. I used a poly sphere then made two holes for the eyes and shaped it to resemble the skull. I then extended the bottom to make the open mouth and a wide smile. Next I extruded out the horns and shaped them to the concept art. I then made the teeth and tongue, making sure they were angled properly to make them scarier. I even stuck in two sphere for the eyes so they could be coloured later. The hardest part of the head was constructing the flames at the top of the skull. I thought it would be easier to model them rather than try create some effect later in Unreal. This took me most of the day to do but by the end I had managed it. Below shows what I had got done.
The next part was to create the cloak. For this I began with a 2D plane and shaped it to the drawing by looking at it straight on. So now I had a flat shape that fit the drawing perfectly. Next I extruded the 2D plane to make it 3D. Then I sculpted it until it resembled a cloak. This took a long time as I had to form the shoulders and small tails at the bottom. After this I made the hood. This was also complicated as I had to extrude the hood from the cloak, then shape it around the skull head, making sure it also had a rounded shape. By the end I had this.
This was not looking very good as the horns and flames on top were poking through the hood. After showing this to the group they agreed it did not look the best and we decided to remove the flames as the horns were not too bad.
This was looking much better and to my liking. Finally I created the two floating hands. This was simple and involved me extruding a poly cube to create fingers. I made sure they were angled properly and pointy so they looked scary.
That is all for this week as this was definitely a far more complex model than my last ones and it took me a long time to get each part right. However I do intended to continue refining the model more next week.