Week 5: L. Ron Hoyabembe

This week there's slightly less to talk about, it mostly consisted of smaller and less interesting aspects of the character production pipeline. To start the week I got to work on adding the last few essential parts of the character, before working down into smaller details. Y'know, broad strokes and all that. So I made the boots first of all, which was actually a 3D scan of my own boot using 123D Catch for the iPhone. I figured as this was meant to be a realistic character I would use all the tools I could to keep it as life like as possible. Marvelous Designer really helped out with the more complex stuff like the jacket last week, but for the boots, 3D scanning seemed like the way to go.

Now of course as you can see the scan of the boot was in no way perfect, and more than anything just served as a base for me to sculpt over. I don't consider this to be cheating or a shortcut because I am simply using the appropriate tools to create realistic assets, and the amount of fixing and polish that went into this took a lot of work in itself. It wasnt like I was just able to scan in a perfect 3D model.

Next I moved onto the last essential part of the character, the generator backpack. Most of this was modelled in Max as the sortware simply suited my needs for this asset. As you can probably tell from this screenshot my character is deceptive in it's detail. Most of the mode detailed assets such as the backpack and head are simply boxes, spheres and cylinders with some detail added in in zbrush. I tried to keep in mind that I needed ares of detail and areas of rest within my character. I wanted some parts such as the backpack to look really cluttered and noisy, as that was the general theme of the BHEAD designs I was following.

. The last touches to the character were seemingly the longest. These small details that grounded the character in realism felt at times unimportant, but in the grand scheme of things I thing the character wouldn't look half as realistic without them.

Above is the *almost* final render of my character. This was done Wednesday evening when I thought I had finished the sculpt, however on Thurday mornign I spoke to Craig and ended up redoing the shirt as there was one big fold that really stood out and made his body look distorted and unnatural.

Next up, the beginning of the boring part yay! Retopology was, as you can probably imagine, an absolute nightmare for this character. Most of the character was made without a basemesh or a lowpoly, as most of the time I like to work from scratch in Zbrush so I can be as creative and unrestricted as possible. So pretty much everything, bar the backpack, had to be retopoligised manually. I used the conform tools and step build in 3DS Max to do this and after this project I've found Max to be the best for my retopology needs. I much prefer it to the retopology tools found in Zbrush and 3DCoat.

Yep, there was a lot of retopology.