Post Production
In this assignment we have been tasked to design and create a character that will fit in to a premade environment. I chose to make a character for the abandoned hospital environment as I saw many different opportunities to create an interesting character. First, I started off by making a mood board and trying to get references that matched the vision I had for my character.
My idea I have for my character is to make a half zombie, half cyborg. The story behind this character is, this is set in a post apocalyptic world were a scientist was experimenting on a zombie. A disease has spread and is starting to take over this character, in order to try and save others the scientist uses this character as a test platform removing already infected parts of the body with prosthetic counterparts going as far as even replacing most of my characters organs. Some of the main points i want to focus on with this character is the prosthetic arm, spinal tubes and asymmetrical muscle form.
The first part of my character I wanted to design was the spinal tubes. My first idea I had was to make it one large tube that would be transferring a liquid between the upper and lower body. My second design was to have that same idea but instead of one big tube there would be lots of smaller tubes, this design allowed to have some of the tubes routed to other parts of the body, one idea i have is to have one of the tubes going to the prosthetic arm. another idea I had was to make my character incredibly skinny with ribs visible through the skin and the muscles being very distinct as the character would have little to no fat. the idea i decided to move forward with was the second one, building on this I came up with a design to better show the function of the tubes by having them large veins connect at the top of the tubes.
Some other designs I wanted to try at the start of design my character was having spore clusters showing the infection spreading across my character. I decided that instead of having the spores spread across the entire body it would make more sense that they would be located towards the areas that would have the prosthetic replacements. I was also testing the idea of having parts of the face being replaced with prosthetic replacements as well, for example having the mouth covered by a gas mask with a tube connected to the spinal column, and a similar design with the head but having one of the eyes replaced with a camera design.
I then moved onto designing the arm, my initial designs all involved the elbow joint being controlled by a piston extending and contracting to bend the arm. In the end I decided to simplify the idea based on the fact that this character is supposed to look like he was thrown together with scraps and parts they had lying around without having efficiency in mind. So I decided that it would make more sense there just being a very simple pivot point. For the hand I decided to go with a similar design in the sense of ease were I would have the main palm with sphere bearings for the joints and cylinders for the bones. To connect the prosthetic arm and the body I had a few ideas, firstly, I was planning on making the prosthetic arm extend all the way up to the shoulder, however, I was unable to make an efficient deign for the shoulder joint when I went to model it. I decided that it would be easier to have the arm connect midway through the upper arm. Another idea I have is to make the skin wrap around the metal prosthetic, I then had ideas to put staples and nails to make it look as if the skin has been fastened to the prosthetic.
This is my final character deign, I decided to use the multiple different tubes for the spinal column to allow for my to have a pipe going to the arm, I then decided to give my character a gown that would fall around the spinal column. Another design I decided to go with was having the muscles asymmetrical as my character would have being counter balancing from the prosthetic arm and leg, so the side with the prosthetic arm would have over developed muscles in the shoulder and back where as the other side would have an underdeveloped arm and ribs viable through the chest. the colours I had in mind for my character was to to have a base skin tone with colder tones to show that he is malnourished and sickly, the spores would by various greens, blues and purples. The prosthetics would be rusted metals and where they connected to the body I want to have blood seeping down. I then want the bottom of the legs and gown to be dirty. To make the big veins coming from the pipes I am going to bake in the detail to and then paint the veins on in a purple to give us the illusion that they have been modelled on.
Production
For this character I decided it would be easier to break him up into separate parts instead of trying to make everything in one go. I started off with the upper body and head as I felt like they would have been the hardest when it came to retopology. I fist made a base mesh by sculpting basic shapes into the general shape that got my characters silhouette, I then remeshed everything into one object, starting off low, I began to slowly add more polygons to my upper body giving more details until I decided to use the dyntopo tool to for the facial features. Once I was happy with the amount of detail in my base mesh I began retopologising. To make this process a bit easier I used three add ons, key ops: toolkit, loop tools and polyquilt retopology tool. As my character is asymmetrical I was unable to use a mirror modifier making this process a bit longer that I had hoped, but I started off with a plane, a shrinkwrap modifier, snapping enabled and using the polyquilt tool I began extruding and moving the edges to try and get correct edge flow. To make the retopology as good as possible I used a lot of different references as parts of the body, for example the face and hands, have very complicated topology.
For elements like the spinal tubes and prosthetics I chose to just hard model them as they were for the most part spheres and cylinders and I was not planning on having them deform or bend so there was no need to have topology with that in mind. Some elements I also made at the end after I had posed my character, one of them was the gown, I decided to make this by making a cube around the legs with a hole at the top that fit around the tubes. I then added a few subdivisions to allow for the cloth to bend and fall around the legs. First I added collision under the physics tab to the legs and spine, I then added a cloth physic to the gown and messed around with the settings until I came to an outcome that I was happy with . Once I was happy with the shape I added solidify modifier to give the plane thickness. Another element I made after i had posed my character was the pipe going from the spine to the prosthetic arm. I used the same process for the upper body as I did for the lower body.
Once I was happy with the topology I then used a multires modifier which will allow me to bake the details into the normals. For the lower body I used the multires modifier to define the detail in the muscles, I then made a the spores on the leg with the prosthetic using the multires instead of having to implement the spores into the retopology. For the upper body I used the multires modifier to define the rib cage on the underdeveloped half of my character, unlike my lower body I decided to model the spores as part of the retopology for the lower body so I was able to define the lumps and add more smaller spores around those areas, I then went to the bottom of the ribcage and started making large veins where the tubes would connect and branched these out across the back mostly as well as some small veins scattered around the upper body. Across all of the skin I then used a custom brush to add pores.
Texturing
The textures for the upper and lower body skin follows similar steps, first, starting off with a base skin texture, I then duplicated that texture, changed the tone slightly and changed the layer mode to overlay, added a black mask and painted on the shadows in spaces where the skin would fold. I then did the same thing with more of a red tone and painted it around the facial features and hands to make it look like it is a little bit cold. I then used a purple skin colour lowered the opacity to then painted on the veins. The spores followed a similar process as well, with around three skin textures, one green, another blue and the final one purple, I then layered these around the areas that the spores are infecting. for the dirt on the legs I used the basic mud texture with a black mask and a position generator to only affect the bottom of the legs.
For the prosthetic arm and leg I decided to use a iron texture that had scratches and scuffs built in. I then used the basic rust texture the an edge wear generator to make it look a little bit older. in places where the prosthetic will connect with the arm I also added a flesh texture with a position generator to only affect certain parts of the model. For the prosthetic foot I also added a mud texture and a generator so it only affects the bottom of the foot.
Rigging
Once I was happy with all of my textures the last thing I had to do in blender was rigging and posing my character. I made a quick basic rig for my character only focussing on the skin and spine as I would use constraints for the prosthetics. I then parented the armature with the mesh and cleaned up some of the weights. For the prosthetic arm I first went up the chain of fingers and parented the bones to the joints and the joints to the hand, hand to the forearm, forearm to the elbow and elbow to the upper arm. I then used a child of constraint on the upper arm and targeted it to the shoulder bone in the armature, finally I had to move some of the origin points so that they would rotate at the correct places. I then posed the characters and applied all of the modifiers and constraints.
All that was left to do was bring in my character into unreal engine. In the scene I found a room with some natural window to all for me to have as much natural lighting as I could, I changed some of the world light settings and added a rectangle light on each window to help the world lighting a bit, for the most part I wanted my scene to be pretty dark as the only source of light in an abandoned hospital would be whatever lighting comes in from the windows. I then had to import my character, scale and position him in the room and import and apply all of the textures.
Reflection
One of the things I did that I would have done differently was not spend so much time trying to learn zbrush. At the start of this project I was planning on using zbrush for the sculpting and using blender for the retopology, however, I spent to long trying to learn this software and by the time I decided to cut my loses and use blender the entire way I was already very behind. This affected the rest of my project as If I had more time I would have wanted to make some moving parts for the prosthetic and possible animate my character in the scene. One of the things I am proud of was the high poly bake and the textures, compared to the last character that I made, this one has much more detail.