This guy started out as a really quick 15 min sketch back in November. I just loved his lips and derpy expression so much that I wanted to see if I could bring him into 3D. When I found out about the Blizzard Character contest I thought it would be a great reason to push his design and really have fun with a painterly texture style.
Step 1. Concept
Step 1. Concept
The initial sketch and a quick 20 min color/light study. I had a pretty good idea of what colors I wanted him to have so this was a pretty fast process. I grew up always having some sort of freshwater tank in the house and always loved the colorful catfish-type breeds you could get. At first I played around with the idea of him having more muddy colors like a real catfish, but decided that if he was an NPC you were trying to find underwater from a distance, than I wanted you to be able to see specs of color from afar. I didn't want him to totally pop out, but I didn't want him to blend into a watery blue blur.
2. Next I did a very basic body sculpt in Zbrush(render from Maromset):
I knew I wanted to flesh out a lot of his details with cards and simple geo but I wasn't quite sure how I wanted his tail fin to look; should it be thick or long and flowy? I thought the spikes on his tail in the initial design was a little too much so I dropped them. I saved out this sculpt as a base, and then retopo'd it in zbrush, getting the base body down to about 3k polys. I also didn't want this to get pushed too far into realism so I held back on a lot of the smaller details; I would fill those in via texture painting. This gave me a good base for the face details to generate a basic grayscale map from a baked normal map that I could use as a paintover guide.
Various stages of modeling/retoping between zbrush and maya
3. Uving and building out decor detail geo
After I got the model where I wanted it to be geo-wise, I built out all the extra details and decorations.
I cut the main body in half, and cut UV seams for how I wanted the geo laid out:
After I got the model where I wanted it to be geo-wise, I built out all the extra details and decorations.
I cut the main body in half, and cut UV seams for how I wanted the geo laid out:
Geo mirrored, showing the texture seams cut in
4. Texturing
Once I had all the geo laid out I went ahead and started painting in the texture. I started with a flat color laid over the normal map I baked out from the original zbrush sculpt:
Once I had all the geo laid out I went ahead and started painting in the texture. I started with a flat color laid over the normal map I baked out from the original zbrush sculpt:
From start to finish this guy took me two weeks, working 2-3 hours a day.
I feel like I'm leaving out a million in-between steps but these are the big chunks of process I used to create this guy. I ended up creating a full map set for him, for more professional renders outside of what was required for the Blizzard contest. The Blizzard version was only rendered out with a diffuse map. This version has a diffuse, spec, normal, and emissive map applied but the same polycount.
Tools:
Zbrush 4R6
Maya 2014 student edition
Photoshop CC
Mental Ray
Marmoset 2
Happy Gaming!
Zbrush 4R6
Maya 2014 student edition
Photoshop CC
Mental Ray
Marmoset 2
Happy Gaming!
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