Game Design: FPS

To begin this project, for which i elected to be the Character designer for, i began by sitting with Steve, the character concept artist, aswell as the rest of the team, and begun discussing the idea of the enemies, once a general overall decision was made, i began to throw together some mood boards as usual.

Next up we discussed what elements from different pre-existing designs we liked, collectively, and which we didn't, then i began to photo bash and sketch over designs borrowing these elements, as an initial way to begin visualizing the enemy characters, both for Steve as the concept artist, and myself.

With this idea established, Steve proceeded to design the characters we would include in our wave based FPS game, while i would begin on making rough low poly base meshes, the resulting, following concept Design is the work of Steve Welch, and not my own.

With a concept to follow, i spent a week or two creating a base mesh that matched it as closeley as i was able....

... But before long, i decided i wasn't happy with the way it was going, it was suggested that instead of trying to juggle both Topology AND Form simultaneously, to switch into Zbrush and concentrate soleley on the Form, before quad-drawing the low poly from this Zbrush model to work on Topology later on, so with this in mind i proceeded into Zbrush....

I began with the provided, male anatomy tool within Zbrush (Nickz_HumanMaleAverage.ztl) Again, not my work, and after deleting out the base sub tool, adjusting the proportions and anatomy ended up with something to start out from...

I began with the head, using mainly just the movc, clay buildup and smooth tools to rough out a general shape, and then moved up the sub divisions, refining areas, i repeated this down the body, concentrating mostly on general muscle groups, but always kept in mind where the armor would fall, and that the end result would neither have legs or hands...

I chopped the Mask from the early Maya base mesh attempt, and exported as an OBJ, before appending it as a sub-tool, shapping it to the new mesh's head and sculpting in some detail, i repeated the process with a cylinder for the mechanical windpipe/throat.

I masked off an area of the torso, and used the Extract Mesh function to create the chest piece, before using the move, smooth, flatten and polish brushes to create the shape i wanted while working up the sub divisions.

I used a basic sphere and formed the Shoulder guards in a similiar manner.

I then masked off the legs, and after using the visibility function and hiding them, proceeded to delete hidden. After, i cut the flying base i had previously modeled within Maya, and imported it, scaling it to fit the new model.

Now the model was slowly starting to resemble the desired design, i proceeded to begin working in slightly finer details such as the jets below the flying base, the cables within the join between man and machine aswell as details to the armor and torso. Alot of this was done either with clay build up and Dam standard tools, or through using the masking tool and brushes such as inflate, for example the jet-nodules below.

Using the same technique as the legs, i removed the hands and wrists, and capped them off with cylinders.

I used IMM (Insert Multi-Mesh to string pre-fab pieces together to knock up the characters gun. And created the basis for the other arms katana-like blade from a cube.

After this stage, i proceeded to decimate the model down to a manageable poly count, before exporting to Maya as an OBJ.

After setting the decimated model as live, i set about Quad-drawing the new, low-poly models Topology over the top.

Paying close attention to areas such as joints that would see alot of movement, mostly the armpit/shoulder area i continued to add the new Topology until the entire model was covered, in the process taking the 40k decimated model, down to just over 10k tri's.

Then it was time to Build a skeleton using humanIK, for the rig i simply deleted the legs and hands from the standard skeleton provided, moved each bone and joint into place, and bound the mesh to the skeleton, then painted the wieghts to limit distortion before it was ready to pass to George Burchmore to put to his animations and place into the game as place holder.

I then returned to Maya and proceeded to UV Map the low poly model, i did this by selecting edges to become seams then cutting UV edges and unfolding them within the UV editor.

I then returned to the Original High Poly model from Zbrush, and using Xnormal, generated both a Normal map and an Occlusion map.

The Rigged and animated model, with Normal Map and AO, as both a render (Top), and in the Unity Game Engine our project was being built in.

With all the Maps generated, the last thing i needed was a ColourID Map, so i returned to Maya, and by selecting all the desired faces of a particular area, and assigning a Lambert Material, which i would then assign a set color too, i would differentiate between the different materials intended for the final model, skin, and various metals mostly.

Once i had baked the ColourID Map using the Turtle PlugIn within Maya, i loaded the Mesh, along all the required Maps needed, into Quixel Suites Ddo and 3Do, and began to add textures to the various materials.

The second part i would need to do for the group project, was modelling the arms and hands for the player controlled character, for this piece, i had to attempt to work to higher detail than on the Enemy model, as the arms and hands would be on screen and directly in the players view all of the time, however i had far less time available to spend upon them in proportion to the overall larger, Enemy project.

To save time, i re-cycled the arm from the Enemy, being as the only detail on the enemy was the upper, bi-cep/tri-cep area, which when positioned around the camera for the Player character, only the forearms and hands should be visible.

The arms upon the Enemy, BEFORE i removed the wrists and hands.

By Masking off the rest of the uneeded Torso i was left with the desired Arm, i would only need one to model, as i would Mirror Geometry to Duplicate this over once completed.

Using Pretty much identical techniques as the main Enemy, i created the detail of the arm, focusing most of my attention to the forearm as the the upper arm would mostly be out of shot, and the hands would spend most of their time around the gun. Once this was complete i exported the model out as an OBJ ready to Import into Maya and repeat the same Quad-draw process as before to create the low Poly.

The Quad drawn Low poly as a work in Progress.