Scope
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Asset
7700 tris 500 px texture in-game |
Creation
3D-Modeling using Blender, ZBrush 3D-Texturing using Substance Painter Rigging using mixamo.com |
Character: Scientist
The scientist is a unit of the realtime-strategy game Abyss Lab. The player will use this unit in the laboratory to research monsters by harvesting some kind of resource.
Character Design
There are two key-colors: white and cyan. My first idea was to give them an exclusive white doctor scrub, but since the laboratory is mainly white, the player would had some problems to distinguish them from the floor and walls. On the other hand they couldn't be just one dark color either, for the scientist is sometimes forced to exit the building and enter an underground environment which mainly consists of brown and grey colors.
So I decided to give them a thick apron as well, among safety gloves and boots. The scientists are doing research on monsters and therefore have to be more protected. About shape language is not much to say. The main part is obviously a doctor scrub, but I choose to make the apron wide and angular, as well as the black latex areas at the gloves and boots, to give the feeling of protecting. Furthermore, they wear three phials whose colors matches the laboratory striplight in order to give the player a hint, where this unit unually belongs to. |
Process of creation
After I created the concept art & color decisions, I started with the human model in Blender. Using cubes I blocked out the main proportions of the clothings and exported this into ZBrush.
There I sculpted all details. It is worth mentioning here, that the amount of detail was way to exaggerated for a RTS-game. Even with zooming close the player has hardly any chance to see the amount of details. I did this for presentation purposes. Once I was finished, I used ZRemesher and Projection to create a lowpoly, clean mesh, which got imported back to Blender. Here I made some fixes, added more loop cuts in the area of joints and removed unnecessary topology. After unwrapping everything on a texture atlas, it got imported in Substance Painter, where I did the map-baking and texturing. The final step is the rigging using Mixamo.com Note that all clothings are created and presented separately from the human body, since clothings are equipable and will follow the movement of the respective character in-game using scripts. |