Originally I had an idea of generating character concepts with the help of Ai, Stable Diffusion and created almost 100 versions to get good looking details for inspiration. The ones that I liked were looking fit like Achilles and I preferred a more agile, athletic look for this character.
Ai generated concepts, adding legs and helmet to complete the design.
After blocking out ai generated concepts in zbrush, I saw another concept art in artstation which looked kind of like Assasins Creed, another fit and aggressive looking character and it clicked, it had cleaner details and wasn't as ambitious as ai generated.. Stopped blocking out and right away began with a tunic + body armor.
"Tiberius Design Sheet" by David Paget
Finishing highpoly and low poly, I wanted to rig this bad boy and take it to Unreal so retopoed tunic and body armor together, belt and buckles together, did countless normal map bakes to get it right.
Happy with the bake results, this is below 30K tris and I can go lower if there was a budget limit but topology-wise I'm fascinated with the work of Apex Legends character design work led by Olivier Couston, in which I know that they target around 30K tris in game. Wanted to actually do something similar, technically.
First time I decided to create hard surface looking parts in Maya, for example did the shoulder pieces with linear bend deformer procedurally, belt and ropes with spline + sweep mesh etc.. It was more controllable for normals baking. Got some pretty clean results.
First time I decided to create hard surface looking parts in Maya, for example did the shoulder pieces with linear bend deformer procedurally, belt and ropes with spline + sweep mesh etc.. It was more controllable for normals baking. Got some pretty clean results.
I could have gone full retopo for a watertight mesh but I wanted to rig and do rigid body dynamics sim on shoulders, belt armor and gladio case. As I know a 20 joint rigid body simulation is way more cheaper than a cloth sim and so easy to setup in UE.
I was only able to work on this character for around 10 days, most of it spent on skinning and setting up a metahuman rig on maya for unreal.
I was only able to work on this character for around 10 days, most of it spent on skinning and setting up a metahuman rig on maya for unreal.
Results
Tunic and Body Armor watertight single mesh combined with shoulder armor pieces and it's going to be a 1 skin cluster.
I have some serious drawcall anxiety from my previous studio (:
Belt, arrows, gladio case, arm shield is combined but separate geo's for rigidbody simulation, 1 skin cluster.
Single tile UV for everything except head and body, which could also be laid out together but metahuman basemeshes have 7 LOD levels for head and 4 for body so currently no need for combining those. Texel density intact for clothing.
Gladio and shield 1 tile, kept it seperately from character.
Painted in UDIM's for ease, combined at post.
29K tris body, head, clothing and armor, (without gladio and shield)
Completed in around 10 days and I will be messing with the rig I've done in UE on upcoming days.
I have some serious drawcall anxiety from my previous studio (:
Belt, arrows, gladio case, arm shield is combined but separate geo's for rigidbody simulation, 1 skin cluster.
Single tile UV for everything except head and body, which could also be laid out together but metahuman basemeshes have 7 LOD levels for head and 4 for body so currently no need for combining those. Texel density intact for clothing.
Gladio and shield 1 tile, kept it seperately from character.
Painted in UDIM's for ease, combined at post.
29K tris body, head, clothing and armor, (without gladio and shield)
Completed in around 10 days and I will be messing with the rig I've done in UE on upcoming days.
Meet Tempest
Tested Substance Stager's RTX renderer, very decent results but its having some problems with surface normals. Shading some parts hard edged. I will give it another go with triangulation and locking normals to see if thats the case.
but nothing can match Arnold GPU in terms of quality and speed :)
Rigged and skinned, slow-mo animations and a simple scene in UE5, CTRL Rig + Level Sequencer.
