FMP Dev Diary 03: Future Hockey Player

This character took way longer than I had expected to actually come up with a clear idea.

It went through so many varied ideas and designs, and this was mainly because the only limitation in had set with this character design-wise was that it was meant to be based on contemporary clothing design within the past 100 years. So essentially as long as it had real world clothes it could be anything.

I had considered many things, such as a mech robot similar to the design of Chappie that would be wearing stylish clothes, a flamboyant retro professional bowler with iconic clothing of that retro American culture, a 50s American explorer kid reminiscent of films such as Stand by Me, and an iconic british 80s sportswear character in control of a huge exo skeleton.

One of the main ideas I was really considering was a noodle delivery guy, who went around on roller skates, and would have a design that it quite goofy and colourful. I put a lot of research in to this idea, and uniforms/clothing that would fit the idea, as clothing was the most important part of this project.

None of these idea really spoke to me, and I think a large part of why I wasn’t feeling them was because I hadn’t considered the type of game they would be a part of.

Somewhere along the line I was reminded of Splash Damage’s characters for Brink and Dirty Bomb. The idea of making a character for a multiplayer game that serves an objective would be really cool, as I could tailor the design of the character around the purpose they’re meant to be carrying out. So I got to work on some basic sketches for that.

Alongside making these initial sketches I went about researching a lot more game examples of the type of character I wanted to make, as I think I had been spending too much time focusing on real world things, and it was really hard to figure out what I was going for stylistically.

In terms of style I was very interested in Calum Alexander Watt’s art style, particularly his Sci-Fi personal work. I was also looking at Gears of War characters for stylised proportions and halo characters. This was because I was considering incorporating elements of sci fi into this character. I was really unhappy with my attempts at a hard surface sci fi style with the Dorothy character, and I was determined to do better this time around, knowing what went wrong with the previous project.

Picking out elements I liked from various designs I put together a fairly final concept. The idea for this character is that he would be in a multiplayer game, where his abilities would be similar to that of a football player, he would have to be fast (hence the rollerblades) but he would also have to be powerful enough to tackle people. However upon discussing with people, the idea eventually evolved into a Hockey player, as this would best incorporate the idea that he is a rollerblading brute character.

I began work on the base mesh for the character’s body in Zbrush. Over the course of FMP, with my own learnings and the vast amount of critique I’ve received I am not far much more confident in my anatomy skills and it didn’t take me too long at all to sculpt out a decent enough base. This time round I used a 3D scan of a male body as reference, rather than photos from the internet, and this helped considerably in the process, as it allowed me to closely examine the body from all angles. This will be something I definitely carry forward in my future work, as I’ve realised how much 3D reference can benefit you. Even though this wasn’t a particularly long time spent on sculpting the anatomy, I really did learn a lot thanks to the scan reference. I didn’t have to spend the time working out the areas that I didn’t have clear reference for, it was all there in one scan.

However I did of course try to incorporate my own style into it rather than going 100% realism, as this character was to be following the style of games like Dirty Bomb.

The anatomy and basic block out took me around 2 days to complete. And of course the block out is nothing spectacular. Looking back at it now, it looks so bad, but is surprising to see how much of it remained in some way in the final sculpt.

The next step was working my way through some of the bigger elements of the character. Starting with the Jacket/shirts layered up for the torso area. This is probably the most ambitious thing I’ve attempted with marvellous to date. Usually they’re quite simple garments covered up with other details, like the armour for the knight character. This time round it was 3 separate garments layered on top of each other, that had to look like they were sitting naturally together, and on top of that they had to be affected by all the additional parts of the costume surrounding it, such as the belts, straps and shoulder pad. And not to mention the fact that these garments wouldn’t really be covered up or hidden at all.

It’s also challenging for the fact I was trying to create realistic contemporary clothing.. This is challenging because people will be able to spot the mistakes I make more because these are the types of clothes most of us see on a day to day basis, and can therefore be very critical of.

To tackle the issue of how they would sit together correctly by making all 3 garments in the same Marvelous project simulating in real time on top of each other. This ended up being incredibly long winded and frustration because of the amount of issues that would go wrong when I had so many garments simulating in one file, and it was really hard to keep on top of when you’re simulating in real time.

But with a reasonable placeholder mesh I exported it back to my character file in Zbrush and having the addition of some fairly realistic clothing was really helping the character come together, after only working on is for a few days.

I also made some placeholder jeans in Marveous for the time being, however they were quite weird and overly wrinkled and didn’t really help the design.

The backpack was a large cylindrical device that in my original concept was meant to be a canister holding some sort of tree or life form that would be either giving the character oxygen or used as the objective of the game, in which the character would have to transport it to some sort of goal. After deciding to go down the route of the hockey player I had pretty much decided this was going to be used as an oxygen tank.

I was a little concerned at this point I maybe hadn’t thought out the helmet design enough, so I set aside a decent amount of time to experiment with concept sculpting. Using the move/clay tools in particular to bash out ideas. It took a lot of tweaking to get the design looking how I wanted. One of the things I liked about the design of the Dorothy character was the overlapping and intertwined nature of the legs. I thought it would be great to incorporate it in some small way to this helmet, to give it a better read, and not look so much like it was just random panels placed lazily.

I wanted this helmet to have thickness to it, like how you would see with a proper protective helmet such as a cycling helmet. With a cushioned inside and a strong protective outer layer. I designed the helmet panels to look thick and like they could take the pressure of hard hits.

The base sculpt for this helmet was very messy and blobby at this point, but they design was there, and it was clear, and I planned to come back to it later to make it properly hard surface.

With the helmet, someone made a suggestion that I should look at hockey helmets, and how they have a cage around the face area to protect them from getting hit in the face. I thought this was a great idea and would really help my character read as being a hockey player and less of a complete Sci-Fi project.

I wanted this character to look like a sort of 80s imagining of the future. A sort of dystopian style reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy films of the 80s/90s. This is the reason I chose the clothing I did, because I wanted it to be a sort of homage to back to the future. And it would help people instantly recognise the era and style.

At first I feel that I was a little ambitious with the amount of additional attachments the character was going to have, especially considering their lack of importance to the main design. I just wanted them there as additional hints to the purpose and era of this character with possible pop culture references to that time within what I made, like pepsi cans and possibly a Walkman.

The shoulder pad I made was influenced my American Football gear, and was intended for the character to use as he tackles people in the game.

The next step was getting the jacket/shirts looking better, as the placeholder version was really starting to bug me because it just didn’t look right, and was simply hindering the rest of my work.

What I essentially ended up doing to save me from the issue of trying to get them all looking perfect in real time simulation at the same time, was to start from the bottom up. So firstly I just simulated the shirt underneath, and used morph target to apply all the straps that I had made to the avatar mesh in Marvelous. Once that was done I froze that shirt and did simulated the next garment on top of that, redoing the morph target each time. I did this for each of the 3 garments and the end result came out pretty good. Of course with something this complex there was a big clean up task in Zbrush, but that was to be expected, and at least now I had a solid base for the clothing and could change it wherever necessary without too much hassle.

Over the weekend I worked on a sculpt of a male head. It was originally just going to be as detailed as was necessary for the time frame of the character. But I figured seeing as I had the weekend free I would use this as an opportunity to turn it into more of a study to practice faces. I worked on it for a fair amount of time during the weekend getting feedback from people on the internet along the way.

I then just had to tweak the face and helmet a bit so they sat well together.

The shoulder straps were then done properly following the same method I used for my Helmeted Character last year for the style matrix. I sculpted out a basic strap that by itself wasn’t very interesting, then drew out an insert mesh brush on top of that to look like a proper shoulder strap.

Back to the helmet, I separated the panels out to separate pieces and refined them as best as possible with the Trim Dynamic and Hpolish tools, and then instead of using Zbrush, I decided to do what I was more comfortable and confident with, and use Max for the proper hard surface modelling.

Over the course of this past project I had learnt quite a few cool new things for hard surface modelling and I was keep to test them out.

I used the retopology and conform tools in max to do a retopo over all the pieces I had made in Zbrush, and then spent some time tweaking them to fit well together in Max. And then instead of using smoothing groups or edge loops to control the edge flow of the turbosmooth modifier I used edge creating. This way I could easily control which individual edge I wanted to be hard and which would be smooth without having to keep smoothing groups or topology flow in mind. I actually learnt this from a game artist I follow on twitter, and from the people I’ve spoken to, no one seems to have heard of this method of high poly modelling in max and it honestly really sped up the high poly modelling process. And one of the greatest benefits was that it made no actual difference to the normals, smoothing groups or topology of the low poly, so the low poly model was exactly as it needed to be for unwrapping and baking.

Going back to the character model in zbrush, I was looking for ways to make the backpack more interesting, and from an early concept of a Dead Space character I saw, it have me the idea to put some sort of elasticated tarp, strapped to the backpack with elastic cords, that would separate the backpack canister from sitting bare on the back of the character.

I went through some stages of refining the rollerblades, based on some really interesting ref I found for 80s/90s style ones. At this point I tried to do a proper version of the jeans in Marvelous, and after bringing it back into zbrush and discussing with people, decided that the leans weren’t a good idea. At first I considered having some kind of short for the character, but I felt that even though it looked good for the design, it distracted from the rest of the character and made it look too goofy. I ended up referring back to the Dirty Bomb characters and made some slim fitting sporty leg wear with integrated padding and protection that were influences partially by what I has seen on their characters.

Upon the advice of tutors I then built up the tackling side of his body with a huge hockey glove and elbow pad to help the intended power of this character read better.

After speaking to craig, who shared my enthusiasm for CAW’s art work, we decided the current backpack didn’t work and was a distracting and ugly shape for my character. Craig encouraged me to look at the way CAW uses more organic shapes in his mech designs, so I complete re0-did the design for the backpack in a much more simple yet appealing style.

After this it was just a case of general clean up and refining. And adding that last ass of detail. One of the critiques I got on my work is that whilst the base of my zbrush work is good, I generally neglect to do that last pass or detail that really helps sell the realism of the design, such as minor folds and memory folds in clothing, scratches, tears and damages, etc. I took extra focus on the main clothing to look really realistic, and paid close attention to reference for how the different types of fabric loom when they’re worn and creased.

Due to time constraints with this being my last project and now being quite far behind the deadline I really powered through the retopology for this project, and got most of it done within a weekend. Unwrapping was fairly straight forward, although this time I paid close attention to how you are supposed to handle the low poly of hard surface objects for baking. I made sure all my smoothing groups were correct and separated the UV islands. I learnt this from Scott Homers Baking tutorial, as the baking of hard surface items was an area I’d neglected to learn properly about for a long time.

The baking went incredibly fast this time round, thanks to the fact I learnt you could bake your objects in Substance Painter all in one go by separating objects by mesh name. instead of having to do like 15 separate bakes of all the individual maps and compiling tem in Ps I was able to bake everything in one go. And not only that, Substance also bakes all the maps such as World Space normal and curvature maps exactly as they are needed to be used in substance for all the smart materials, smart masks and generators.

This is by far one of the best technical things I’ve learnt during this project. This saved me so much time and mean that all the procedural work in substance provided much better results.

So texturing went along nice and smoothly for this project, with no rush to get it done too, because of how fast this project went.

For the texturing I had help from Lewis who did a paintover for me, because I often find I lack creativity when it comes to the texturing side of things. And also had a lot of feedback with other people when it can to material definition. And this time round there was a lot more clear difference in materials, and I took full advantage of both Metalness, Roughness and Specular maps.

The same as the last character I polypainted the skin textures and baked them on to separate UVs. I didn’t bother using substance at all and instead made the textures all by hand in photoshop, as there is a lot of variation in the greasiness of the face and I wanted to have as much contrast and variation as possible to make it realistic.

A cool idea I found from an artist on Artstation was to sculpt the shape of sweat drips down the face of my character and then make sure it’s completely shiny on your roughness map. If I hadn’t of sculpted them and just used roughness the sweat would have looked completely flat and unnatural. And I think sculpting it turned out really well once all the maps were done.