Character Design Practice
polycounter lvl 6
Hi everybody. This is my first official post here on Polycount since I haven't been active in years. My name is Chris Sulzbach and I'm a Lead Character Artist at Firaxis Games and my last two projects were XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Within. I've been a Polycount reader for years but rarely posted and if I did it was under my old username of sulz.
This year I wanted to start putting myself and my work out there more as kind of a new year's resolution type thing, so here we go!
This is my first character design that I'm posting in what will hopefully become a series of portraits of these alien races. I am going to strive to do 1 every two months or so in my free time. I hope I can stick with it!
I hope you like this little guy. He started as a weekend long bust that I extended out to be this creature. I streamed most of the creation on my twitch channel but I also recorded it all to save out as a timelapse to post too. I hope you all enjoy this piece and I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks to Dave Black, Aaron Yamada Hanff, Andrew Kincaid, and Matt Demaray for their feedback during the process! Also thanks to those who watched on the stream and offered feedback too!
Replies
Quality = Top Score!
And might I say what a blasts its been blasting your artwork in X-Com
The dark brown areas on the skin seem more like paint rather than a natural skin pattern; that would certainly go well with the feathers.
Personally, I'd like to see aliens that are possible, but challenge conventional designs. Just because all vertebrates on this planet since amphibians have had 4 limbs is no reason for those from other planets to have the same. Radial - as opposed to bilateral - symmetry might just work for those from Betelgeuse. Life on this planet is weird; just imagine how much weirder things get when you have an entire galaxy providing examples.
DWalker : I guess that we mostly see bipeds characters in game because of the skeletons/rigging/animations. And as humans we prefer to see creatures like us, beeing a biped is some proof of evolution and intelligence. Every other life form would appear like "animals". Look at the Elcors from Mass Effect for example, they are quadrupeds, but they can talk and travel into space, but still, they look like animals to us. They have four legs because of the high gravity of their planet, but if they evolved in a lower gravity world, they would be bipeds too.
Now I agree with you, we don't HAVE to stick to what we know to create something unknown, it's just that it's easier for the public to acknowledge it.
John Ehresmann - Thank you!
Dimfist - Thanks a lot! I would normally use that technique for renders, but in this case the eyes were a simple sphere that I just painted the iris, reflections, and highlights on in photoshop.
HP - Thanks!
Deathstick - I'm glad you like the design and I'm even happier to hear you like XCOM!
DWalker - great point about the mammaries and one I will take into the next creature I'm going to design. I wanted to give the character saggy man-boobs strictly for the humor. One of the goals for this series is to keep it light-hearted and not take any part of it too seriously. That .gif you've embedded is terrifying and shit like that scares me to death. I am a big wimp when it comes to crazy walking feather sticks.
SA_22 - thanks a bunch!
Texelion - I totally agree with your response to DWalker and you've hit the nail right on the head with the relate-ability of human anatomy in creature design. I wanted to start with a creature that has recognizable anatomy in it strictly because this is my first one. It is definitely in the cards for me to branch away from strictly human forms down the road once I get some designs under my belt.
Thank you all so much for checking this character out and commenting and giving feedback. Just so you guys know, I am currently working on a time-lapse of the streams that I started about mid way through the creation of this character that will be just sculpting only. I will do some narrating down the line on future projects, but I want to get the whole process set up and down to a science before I go any further with it. I will post some process shots along with the time lapse when it's done.
I do plan on starting a new character on my twitch channel later this week. If you guys follow that site, feel free to add me at: http://www.twitch.tv/sulzbunny
Here are a few quick process images that I can show instead.
This is a BPR Render with a simple clay shader applied in ZBrush.
This is slide shows basically what I started with and where I'd ended up after compositing and painting in Photoshop.
And these are all the passes I used in one way or another.
Hope this is informative enough. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions about it.
Can't wait to see more