FMP Dev Diary 01: Cursed Knight

Instead of doing the usual routine of publishing an individual post every week, I have decided to compile all of my development documentation in to once thorough report for each character. The main reason for this being that there are a lot of tedious and unimportant repetitive tasks throughout this work that sometimes take up to and over a week at a time, and it's all pretty useless information and not worth having its own post where I would be forced to write about useless things. This way I get to focus my efforts on documenting and explaining the important and interesting parts of the design and creation process. So without any more time wasting, I'll get straight on with the stuff you came here to see. Enjoy.

I began with concepting some very basic sketches of the idea I had in mind. The idea was very loose to begin with, and I was still searching for that right idea.

Dark souls was key inspo from the beginning, I knew I wanted to go for a serious realistic fantasy, something very sombre and macabre. Something about that aspect of dark souls really appealed to me.

I Decided to go for a kind of dichotomous duo, a strong heavy warrior character accompanied by a sort of elegant goddess.

At the time it was heavily focused on Japanese mythology, and the warrior character was going to be samurai

They were going to be tied together through a floral design, bouquets that had funeral vibes

I concepted a few variants of the samurai

This character was meant to be a way to showcase my hard surface modelling

Tried to fit hard surface elements into a samurai design but it didn’t work – Samurai didn’t have plated armour, it was mostly fabric

After a few failed attempts at getting a solid idea I moved to European armour designs, as they all tended to wear big plated armour, in varying levels of elegance and badassery.

Renaissance armour became a big inspiration as I researched through the designs more. Renaissance art and the Renaissance era has always been a big inspiration of mine that I wanted to implement into my work somehow

The character essentially evolved into a knight.

Though the characters were no longer connected through their eastern setting I liked the idea of plants and foliage being incorporated to the design of the knight

I decided on the swamp forest idea to give context to the idea

The story in my head began developing around the purpose of the character

At this point I dropped the idea of doing a dichotomous duo, as I felt it would be better to do a contemporary character to showcase my ability to make realistic clothing

Decided to merge the dichotomy into the one character, and give elements of elegance to him to contrast with his character archetype

Floral patterns in armour etc. as well as the flowers

Gathering reference was one of the most important aspects of this project. It really supported the design of the character and helped me achieve a greater level of realism. If you were to look at my Pinterest boards you would probably notice that my character is essentially lots of different great real life armour that has been bashed in to one design. The legs plates and knee high boots were heavily influenced by Henry VIII’s field armour, the helmet was based on a German Stechhelm and the gauntlets were actually based on a really cool costume I found on a website that sells LARPing gear.

I started the project with a very basic base sculpt of a male body in Zbrush, getting the proportions and physique of the character to a point that I was happy with. I really didn’t spend too much time on this as I knew none of his body would be visible under all the clothing and armour.

After this I masked out areas of the body and used the extract tool for the armour pieces. I sculpted into these to make a block out of the character. At this point everything looked crude and poorly sculpted, but the key here was to get the shape of the pieces and the overall silhouette of the character looking good.

I was struggling with the workflow I approached with this, my usual approach is to almost work by making cool stuff from top to bottom, e.g. with my helmeted character, I made a cool helmet, then a cool jacket etc etc. there wasn’t much thought put into the character design as a whole. I spoke to mike Kelly about this who encouraged me to stick with the proper workflow, where you essentially do work in passes of detail. You make a blockout, to get an idea of the silhouette and larger shapes, then you do the mid level stuff, then you do the detail.

For a long while I was really unhappy with the character but I was encouraged to stick with it by mike and it definitely turned out for the best

For peace of mind I decided to refine the helmet to get an idea of what the finished result of the armour would be.

I tried to be subtle and smart around the way I used insert mesh brushes. With the helmet you can see where I used it for the straps and laces. In previous projects I have been fairly obvious around how I used it, but this time round I had the time and knowledge to apply it properly into my workflow

I took the basemesh of the character in to Marvelous Designer and put together some placeholder clothing for underneath the armour this helped me get a better idea of what the character would look like as the sculpting job I did was really crude. This helped my understanding of how the armour would sit on top of the clothing

I spent quite some time then refining the sculpt for the armour

After getting a reasonably solid shape down and some fairly clean faces with the trim dynamic and Hpolish brushes, I went over all the armour pieces one by one with the retopolpgy tool. Creating nice clean low poly pieces that can be easily adjusted with the move brush. Keeping clean topology is important here so that they can subdivide properly, also so I can easily adjust and add/remove loops with the Zmodeler tool.

At this point the armor pieces are shaping up nicely. There is no detail but all the pieces look roughly how I want them to, so I move on to the clothing. I created pretty much all the clothing in Marvelous Designer. Starting with the Gambeson. I created the basic patterns and simulated them on my base mesh with none of the armor/additional stuff. I then created internal lines for the striped pattern of the garment, and duplicated the pieces, layering them on top of each other and increasing the pressure to get that padded effect. Choosing the right material preset is always important as you don’t want your garment to have that uncanny valley feel where it doesn’t look quite right. It’s also important to note that I work with the particle distance on 20 whilst making the garments, and then simulate it at around 5 when I’m ready to make final adjustments and export it. I used morph target to move from a base mesh with exploded armor to one where the armor sits tightly around the body. Which helped squash the clothing in where the armor sits around it. This garment had lots areas where it was clipping through the armor mesh but all those issues can be fixed later on in Zbrush.

The gambeson ended up being one of the aspects I was most happy about, and it didn’t take too much tweaking in zbrush after simulating it. Considering how simple it was to put together in Marvelous, the asset pretty much sold itself and didn’t need much polish. I find Marvelous to be a great piece of software for making materials with a padded effect, because you can just layer up the fabrics, stitch the internal seams and increase the pressure. It can sometimes be quite tricky to get standard fabric materials to sit right around a basemesh.

Once I was comfortable with the clothing that sat underneath I began working on the final pass of detail, which was mostly just filigree covering a good portion of the armour. I did this by masking out alphas of filigree patterns and then extruding them out with the clay or move tool. I had to be fairly careful with this as I’m guilty of going overboard on details sometimes, and it’s important to remember that less is more. Allowing the character to have areas of rest and areas of detail is important and can be a great way of keeping certain areas of your character as focal points.

I spent a lot of time considering where I wanted detail and where I wanted rest areas, I also had to consider as much as possible where the textures were going to affect this.

I then got to work on blocking out where some of the extra details such as the foliage and plume would be, and how they would look. I had been ignoring this part of the job and hadn’t took the time to consider that these would also affect the silhouette and overall read of the character

The cloth around the waist took a considerable amount of iteration as I hadn’t really considered at first its purpose or how it would physically attach to the character. This is the importance of having a solid concept to go off if you want to make a high quality character. I am not an experienced concept artist and it’s certainly not my area of expertise, so it can sometimes cause issues when trying to make my ideas in 3D. However, having a solid understanding of the character production pipeline helps me to create concepts that would work well and be fully functional in 3D. It’s often the case that 2d designs might not translate well into 3D, and being first and foremost a 3D artist really helps with overcoming this issue.

The original Marvelous model I made for it looked closer to a bin bag than a cloth. This was a result of my attempts to create a really frayed and wrinkled fabric, with different fabric property presets. This project really helped me learn the importance of understanding the material properties before trying to make something. It’s something I don’t even think I would have picked up on if it wasn’t for other people pointing out the issues when I asked for critique.

I realised that realistically unless I had some serious confidence in using Marvelous then I would be better just trying to get the closest result possible in Marvelous and then fixing the rest of it with sculpting in Zbrush. So that’s what I did.

I feel that one aspect of this design that went well was the break up of hard surface armour pieces and soft fabric materials. It ended up being quite nicely balanced after a lot of tweaking.

The leather pouches were made in a separate zbrush file so I could focus on them solely for a short amount of time, I followed reference closely and they came out pretty well in the end.

Following this there was just a lot of small and repetitive sculpting and high poly modelling work to get the character looking finished. The sculpting phase of the character ended up taking a week longer than I expected, but realistically I think my original estimates for time were a little unreasonable, as sculpting a good character does take a really long time, and I didn’t want to compromise the quality.

Next up was the retopology, and thankfully a lot of the retopo was already done thanks to the method I used for modelling the armour, however realistically these assets were a little too high poly for what I wanted.

The retopo for everything else was done using a mix of 3Dcoat, Zbrush and Max. I find that as of late I am becoming a lot more fluid with the software I use, and the reason for using so many different methods and softwares is because they each suit a different type of retopology, and I made the decisions based on what each individual asset would be best retopologised with.

Unwrapping and Baking were incredibly tedious processes with this character, as I’ve never had this many individual assets for one character. It wasn’t that the unwrap was hard, it was just incredibly time consuming unwrapping and packing it all. Luckily when you retopo things with 3Dcoat it does a reasonably good job of unwrapping it for you if you set up the seams properly, however these still leaves the time consuming task of packing. I considered getting IPackThat, but I figured for the little amount I actually spend packing as a character artist the software would not be worth it.

Each asset’s high and low poly had to be separated and matched up to bake in xnormal, and once baked the maps were compiled together in a photoshop document after checking to see that they baked out ok in marmoset.

Once all the baking was done I imported both the model and the textures into Substance Painter to begin texturing.

I started the texturing by laying down some basic procedural materials in Substance to get a feel for the material break ups.

A lot of time was spent tweaking the values of the Albedo and Roughness in particular to get accurate material definition. The one critique I get most from experienced game artists is that my material definition isn’t very good. And I think this is down to the fact that I normally rush the texturing phase of my projects. The helmeted character was essentially textured in a single day. This time round I’d given myself a reasonable amount of time to texture properly.

The texture detail was essentially built up in layers, which is how substance works best really.

One of the more enjoyable parts of texturing was all the dirt and mossy build up in the crevices of the armour. The smart masks in Substance worked really well for this, and then I could use the paint tools to fix up the details where I needed to.

Most of the texturing for the armour and clothing was pretty straight forward, and not much to talk about really. Just a lot of back and forth with people giving me feedback on colours, values, details, material definition, etc.

All of the foliage was made separately and added to the character model alongside the texturing process. Most of the foliage was made by sculpting it out in zbrush, polypainting it, and baking it down to a plane which would then be used as an alpha card on my character model. I found that this was a great method of making nicely detailed foliage, and if it’s for a smaller project like this it’s important to have that attention to detail.

Once all of that was placed correctly I got to work on rigging. The rigging for this character was not exactly game ready, as it had a lot of minor deforming and clipping issues, but I only made this rig so I could pose the character properly. I gave him a fairly simple pose, with the hope of coming back to this project later providing I had the time, to make a better pose and a small diorama to go with him.

Seeing as this character was meant to be in a sort of swamp area I tried to make a simple floor that would help this read better. I made a water texture and added some of the grass and reeds from the character on to the floor, and finished it off with some fireflies around the model, which were simple alpha cards with a circular alpha gradient and an emissive colour.