Oh I only meant the blue walls and purple floor. I like the composition itself. Definitely shows his lazy side

Did this one on the Bluemoon Greatsword from Dark Souls 2 last year. I worked with blender and 3D Coat

Hi all. 

After years of doing everything from indie games, teaching game development and working on virtual environment productions, I developed a serious itch to go back to my roots and focus on 3d modeling.

I'm starting this project in my spare time, inspired by this incredibly wonderful concept of Garing3


Besides looking super fun to model, I'm foreseeing some classic challenges when it comes to translating this concept to 3D.

The idea it to turn it into a game-ready asset for a third person game.
(Do you think I should define which game at this stage, so the style of it shapes the modeling?)

LAYOUT

First I invested some time in the Layout phase, trying to align things, seeing where things break when putting simple 3d shapes in front of the concept.


I'm using blender for this one. Since I don't have a model sheet, I prefer to use the Background Images feature of the cameras. This way, the image stays locked in place as I move the camera around and change the focal length.

It's a more familiar workflow for me, coming from Maya and Max.


I also like to place the camera in the first collection, allowing me to quickly toggle the reference on and off with Shift + 1.


I could have spent more time in this phase, but since I'm pretty sure I'll need to make adaptations to the concept to make it work in 3D, I move on to blocking it out as soon and I tested a few configurations and am comfortable with this as a base. 

BLOCKOUT

The first thing I realized was that the barrel couldn't be a perfect circle, as the horizontal cylinder on top (what do you think it should be called?) would be too wide.

This cylinder needed to be wider than the body, but not so wide that it deviates from the concept. However, it also can't be as narrow as the concept, or it won't stick out from the main body.

I'm still using separate pieces, trying to figure out how they can work together:

At this point I'm seriously tempted to try out the newly released Conjure SDF addon 


So this is where I'm at now:

Notably, I decided to rotate the top cylinder. It's a slight deviation from the concept, but I think it visually reduces the perceived width while still ensuring it sticks out from the body. I rotated the side panel for similar reasons, as it would protrude too far to the sides in the back view.

I'm using a subdiv workflow at this stage, as I'm most familiar with it, and using temporary creases to hold the shape. I usually swap them with control loops when It's time to work on the highpoly but I'm considering keeping them and trying out the Zbrush workflow. Still not sure. Feedback on this would be apreciated.

got the diegetic ammo display done. also note how bad the spartans animation is. Actually the posing I am fine with, but its way too fast. Hard to know if its right until its in the game. But timing ultimately depends on what works best for gameplay, so even though it looks awful right now and I want to change it, I'll wait until I have enemies to fight and then I can tweak it to look best with what feels best.
The amazons spear throw I accidentally put too much forward movement into so she snaps back. I won't use root motion to fix that, rather I'll just reduce how far forward she goes. Either way would probably be fine, so I just go with simple appraoch.
In general, since the spartan is a more tanky strong guy and a professional soldier, I try to make his movements short and disciplined, compared to the amazon who is more wild and puts all of her might into her attacks. 
I've already put quite a bit of time into the amazons animations during prototyping and feel they are pretty close to good enough, but rest of the characters will probably need like 3-5 passes each. Hero characters getting the most attention. I try to do all characters passes at the same time, rather than trying to "finish" any particular one, because still learning a lot about animation and so the best that I can do now might be a lot worse than best I can do a few months later.