FMP Dev Diary 02: Dorothy

There were. Few goals I had in mind for this second character

To make a sci fi character, to contrast from the skills I tried to prove with the knight

Further my understanding and execution of hard surface modelling

To follow another artists concept closely and in a professional manner, considering it will most likely be my job to follow other's concepts as a character artist in the games industry

To experiment with stylistic proportions rather than sticking rigidly to realistic anatomy

To practice and showcase doing faces, as it's something I generally tend to avoid in my characters, and is an extremely important skill if I am to be a character artist

REF AND INSPO

For this project I followed a concept from Lewis Jones, this concept was for a character as part of his FMP, which was a street fighter style fighting game based in a sci fi reimagining of the wizard of oz world

He had produced a main concept and orthographics for this character for me to follow

This project was times pretty well with the release of street fighter V, so I could find lots of great ref for their latest characters.

Considering the tight fitting design of the costume, a huge focus had to be put on the anatomy of this character, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to show off my understanding of the female form

From an anatomical standpoint my biggest influence was Cammy and Chun Li. They both feature quite exaggerated features that really help sell the fact that they are fighting characters. They feature big muscles, particularly around the legs. The anatomy is quite far beyond natural muscle proportions but they still manage to retain a very feminine figure, whilst also looking like they could kill you with one kick.

Some key aspects of there designs were, large hands and feet, long legs, big eyes. Minimalistic texturing.

The large hands and feet were a really important part of the design because they helped the characters fighting animations feel like they had a lot of weight behind them. Punched and kicks from these characters looked like they had force behind them, and it was somewhere for the your eyes to follow as the characters played out their animations

The long legs seem to only be there as a stylistic approach to a feminine figure, bot it was a strong aspect of their design nonetheless and something I wanted to follow in my character

The minimalistic texturing of SFV was something I wanted to avoid ideally with this character. Mostly because I want to showcase my texturing ability and although the street fighter characters look good how they are, they don't really follow PBR material workflow and this is something I imagine almost all AAA studios are going to be looking for in portfolios.

My compromise would be that I would go for a fairly clean style of texturing, instead of that almost cliche tendency for game artists to grunge everything up to the max with edge-wear, dirt, scratches, cuts, bruises, etc.

Blair Armitage's character models were another thing I wanted to take inspiration from. Her characters were a great example of stylised characters with a realistic approach to texturing and detailing. Her most recent character model, Aegis, followed quite closely to the anime style of the original, but with high realism when it came to PBR texturing.

So once I had compiled and extensive amount of reference I got to work on sculpting out the proportions. This involved a lot of back and forth with the concept artist who sat next to me throughout this project.

There were a few days purely focusing on the anatomy and proportions of the body and head without making any attempt at the suit or anything else. Gathering constant feedback from everyone I could. Including paint overs from the concept artist to keep it close to his vision

The face was incredibly challenging. Simply getting a female face to look good in Zbrush feels almost impossible. You have to adhere to an the structural principles whilst still retaining a softness to the features, otherwise you'll end up with chiselled manly features. If you go too far the opposite way it just doesn't look realistic at all. What made it even more challenging for this project was Lewis' style. His artwork is quite unique in that his female characters generally tend to have quite strong, sharp features, yet they still look beautiful and feminine. It was important for me to get this right as I was treating this like a professional character job, but also for the fact that Dorothy was meant to be a heroic character, and strong features are key to a lead role. I wanted her to look powerful and distinct.

Another big challenge with the face was the stylisation. I'm not very confident with stylised work and I underestimated how challenging it would be. I learnt that within stylised features there are still many important rules to follow. If I were to make the eyes bigger then that would have a knock on effect to the rest of the features and everything would look wrong. Everything had to be sized and shaped accordingly to fit cohesively with each other. There were certain structural guidelines of the face that could not be ignored.

Even after I had moved on from the anatomy stage, the face was the one thing that was constantly revisited throughout. It seemed as though every day I would notice new problems, or someone would point out a feature that looked off.

As for the suit, I began by sculpting larger details into the anatomy base, to create a padded suit effect. One of the nice aspects of Lewis' design was the subtlety to the suit. He didn't go overboard with stretchy latex folds. Instead he was aiming for something closer to diving suits. Made out of some sort of hybrid rubbery woven fabric, which would give it quite a matte effect. He suggested I follow more of an MGS style, and showed me some example artworks that featured this sort of padded style.

I did attempt a version where I took the anatomy sculpt into Marvelous Designer and tried to make a suit using that, but it took more time that it was worth and didn't provide a good result. I treated it as a learning experience and at least now I have a better understanding of when it is and isn't necessary to use Marvelous.

Following that I got started on the next biggest priority, the legs. Lewis had came up with a really interesting design for the legs of Dorothy that was incredibly ambitious for a 3D model, but I tried to give it my best shot. This is another area of the sculpt that took up an ungodly amount of time. The legs take up around 40% of the entire character and are all a cohesive interwoven network of strange alien shapes. The idea behind this was that when Dorothy puts on the silver slipper an alien armour grows out and wraps itself around her legs, providing strength and protection.

I made the legs by using an insert mesh tube brush in Zbrush. This essentially allowed me to draw out simple tubes on the surface of the model. I tried my best to draw out a pattern close to how Lewis had designed it in his concepts. An aspect of his design that I really liked was how the shapes appeared to be interwoven and overlapping. It was a very organic design that was similar to how an ecorche study might look.

One of the troubles I had with the leg design was the fact that it just didn't read right. It didn't have an appealing flow to it like I hoped it would. So after critique from other people and discussions with Lewis I slightly altered the design to fit in more with how actual leg anatomy looks. If you look around the thigh area particularly you can tell how I tried to replicate the shape of the hamstrings, rectus femoris, etc.

At this point the leg design still looked very blobby and unrefined, and was only really there to get an idea of how the shale would look. The polished version would be attempted further down the line when the character was in the refining stages

I then got to work on some of the bigger hard surface shapes for the sculpt. As you can tell I'm much more in the habit of working from big to small and in passes of detail, as opposed to my old way of trying to make polished stuff from top to bottom.

The collar took a lot of tweaking to get right, but generally other than that the main challenge with the hard surface aspect of this design was just trying to get it all looking cohesive and purposeful, rather than random shapes in random places. Although I admit that's kind of contradictory, as a big aspect of the design of Dorothy is that she has a lot of miscellaneous alien sci fi bits that don't exist in the real world.

That provided it's own challenges though, as I work best when I have clear reference to follow, which is why I think the knight character went very well in the end, because each individual part of his armour was based on existing things I had found on the internet that fit the style and era of my character.

The smaller hard surface bits around the clavicle and shoulder blades took quite a bit of iteration. Part of my concern after speaking to people and getting critique was that the stuff I was following from the concept wasn't translating well into 3D.

One of my biggest flaws as an artist is being stubborn towards changing things once I've already put a lot of work into it. And this was definitely the case with the hard surface parts. It was an issue I really had to try and drop completely with this project as it often held me back. This resulted in this project running even longer than the knight, which was already a week longer than it should have been anyway.

This added with the fact that midway through this project I got very ill and had to take over a week off meant that this project went drastically longer than I had hoped it would, and would cut a major amount of time into both my third character, and more so the time I had allocated for polish and hopefully creating some sort of diorama.

But realistically I had almost expected this to happen. I knew right from writing the brief that if the characters had to take longer than I had planned then I would willingly cut time into polish/diorama weeks for the sake of making sure they were as good as can be. Obviously my priority is having the best characters possible, as I am trying to get a job as a character artist at the end of the day. The dioramas were just something I wanted to add for the sake of presentation.

I took the hands off and sculpted them separately to the character model so I could focus on them isolated without having any distractions. There were quite a tedious task because once I had sculpted out the design of one finger I wanted to see how it would look on the entire hand. So I would have to copy the finger and place each one correctly on the hand, only to decide a few minutes later that something was off, so I would have to go back and fix in on the original finger again and repeat the process. Hands are the worst...

Luckily for me Lewis had even taken the liberty of concepting the design for the top and bottom of the hands separately to the rest of the model so I had good reference to follow throughout making these.

I revisited some aspects of the design after talking with a character artist who had some very useful critique. One of the most interesting aspects of the paint over was the addition to the ankles, furthering the anatomical basis of the leg design

Following this I decided to take another stab at the legs. This time refining them with the trim dynamic and Hpolish tools to get that hard surface feel to them. Once I had cleaned those up as much as necessary I then used the topology brush to retopologise each piece of the leg, this is a technique I picked up from Michael Pavlovich's videos, where he sculpts hard surface stuff with TD and Hpolish, and then retopololigises it, so he has a low poly he can control. With ease, and then with topology loops and edge creasing controls where the element will keep it's edge when he subdivides it, this way you can produce a really clean hard surface element that can be easily taken back to the lowest subD and deformed without making the high poly all lumpy and distorted.

Another benefit of this is that theoretically you should have your low poly ready for unwrapping and baking, rather than the tedious task of doing the retopo all in one go.

The final pass details for the suit and hard surface bits really made all that difference to the final result of the high poly.

Retopology for this character was all fairly standard, not much interesting to tell, it was the same kind of work I had done before with the knight.

Seeing as the face was going to be using a separate texture sheet to the rest of the body (for shader reasons) I decided I would do a bake for that before the rest of the model. Particularly because I really wanted to make sure I got the face right. I wanted to be able to showcase my ability to do faces well with this character. The first bake of the face wasn’t great, particularly for the eyes, but I didn’t really notice until I put a basic skin material on it in substance, and gave her some proper eyes.

I realised the problem with the retopology was there wasn’t enough loops, particularly for the eyes, and it was giving the waterline a sort of hard edge to it. So I went back, added more loops, re-baked the face, but this time I did a polypaint for the base colour in Zbrush. Because another problem with the face was I hadn’t taken into consideration how complex the actual colour detail of the human face is, and even though this was a stylised character, it still needed to follow the same guidelines of realistic texturing.

I paid close attention to the colour zones, and spent time trying to get the secondary details looking right, such as skin pores and freckles/blemishes.

The end result of this was a face that was far more realistic, and had a lot more character to it. With the shader set up properly in marmoset with subsurface scattering and translucency it really brought the face to life a bit more.

Because I had originally done a retopo of the leg panels for the hard surface job (which already took me a really long time) I was planning on using that retopologised version for the low poly model, I knew it would be quite a high poly model if I did this but it was something I was willing to do for the same of quality. However I was strongly advised to retopo the legs as one mesh because there would be a lot of clipping around the joints when bending.

Redoing the legs did set me back quite a bit, as they were a fairly complex piece, and with all the other small assets involved in this, just like the knight, it took me far longer than expected, setting me back roughly another week.

This was around the time that I got ill and had to take a week off of work. Both this and the lengthy retopo/bake left me feeling really negative about my own work. Everything felt like it was going wrong and took forever to fix. This was an extremely demotivating stage of the FMP, I almost felt like giving up at this point.

Although I don’t think this was a bad character, there was so much about this project that left me feeling really disappointed in myself. I think I had built up some sort of hubris following the knight character, and I feel that a lot of the success of the knight was just a fluke.

The bake came out well, I followed a fairly similar routine to the knight with baking things separately, although because I was slightly more confident for the process it didn’t take as long this time.

I imported the model and maps to substance painter and began work on the texturing. I firstly got to work on some of the bigger areas such as the fabric being used for the majority of the suit. It was supposed to be like a hybrid rubbery woven fabric like a scuba suit, so I tried to keep the fabric detail really fine and subtle.

I put some basic procedural materials down for a lot of the body and then moved over to work on the hair for a while.

Right from the beginning I knew I wanted the hair and face to be a real focal point of this character, and something that I could show off and be proud of.

The hair bake itself went through several iterations, the first 2 attempts were done with fibre mesh in zbrush, making clumps of hair that could be baked down on to a single plane. Although I got the high poly hair looking good in zbrush, the bake came out terrible for this.

I eventually ended up following the advice of a tutorial I found, where the person just placed down a plane in zbrush, and drew out loads of extremely thin strands using the curve multi tube brush. This turned out to be a far more effective method for baking it down and looked pretty good in marmoset.

The hair cards were placed on the model by using another insert mesh brush. This really sped up the initial placement process. For the front of the hair I just placed it straight on the model, but for the back I has to sculpt a blockout for the shape of the hair and then draw the cards over that.

I took the cards in to max and unwrapped them all to the same central position in the UVs, all placed vertically. This was for something called anisotropic filtering in marmoset, which improves the texture quality of surfaces at oblique viewing angles. So when you have lots of hair cards that are all facing slightly different directions it helps them shade properly. This process requires all the hair to be facing in the same direction on the UVs though. So my hair textures were all quite straight and completely vertical, and the direction of the hair on the model was controlled completely by the geometry of the hair cards.

The anisotropic filtering along with the rest of the shader parameters took a lot of tweaking to get right, and all in all the hair alone probably took me around 3 days of solid work, with baking, hair card placement and shader control.

Again, just like with the previous project I went about rigging as normal, it went a lot better with this character because the character model’s geometry was much more simple and mostly one piece, but also simply because I had become more confident with rigging at this point.

I tried to give her a pose similar to the fighting stance of Cammy in Street Fighter. I’m particularly pleased with how the positioning of the arms and hands came out. It put a focal point on the hands, which were an aspect about this design I really liked, and I think they worked quite well in this pose, with one of the hands in a fist and the other being spread out.

Final details were applied to the textures but as I said before I wanted to keep this one fairly simple to fit in with that street fighter style to some extent.

The last addition was the floor that I made which I tried to make look like the yellow brick road design in Lewis’s environment concepts.