Reallusion Character Design - Mythcons

Mythcons

Greetings,

I've decided to switch my contest submission to something that was a little more inspiring to me. The character I'm designing is based on Raijin (aka Raiden), the Japanese God of Thunder. In the myths, he is usually equipped with eight drums, with which he signals his thunder. My design is more simplified. The drums are 'represented' as symbols on his outfit. He wields a giant baton that channels his thunder.

Here is the mythological image of Raijin:



Here is a derived design by another artist:



Here is my working design:



What I did was adjust a character in Character Creator and export the image/model into an image editor, then painted over it. Here the model without the additions:

Mythcons

This is not the best example (unfinished!), but the hair is produced by replicating a strip of UV'd polygons and arranging them in the style of the hair I'm trying to achieve. The hair texture is one I found on Google Images and modified so that it's white. By loading an opacity make, you can fade out the edges so that it roughly resembles hair.

The earrings I created in Blender, imported through the 3Dxchange Pipeline and attached the to avatar in iClone. Once attached to the model, they can be loaded through Character Creator and saved as attachments.

The glowing eyes were achieved by adding a 'glow' map to the iris from one of the prefab glow textures included with iClone. iClone has a wide variety of glow maps you can attach to any item.

Mythcons

Some significant changes. Different skin color, added facial hair through the CC's Dynamic Appearance Editor, changed the base character morph, I'm testing out an alternate costume. I will be adding the drums, after all, at a later point.

The facial hair is achieved by going into the Dynamic Appearance Editor, and added custom RBG (Red, Green Blue) maps to the eyebrows, beard, and/or mustache input boxes. I will be including my maps in this post (see ZIP file). You can draw your facial hair in an image editor (I prefer Clip Studio), and layer the red, green, and blue channels to achieve variance in hair color. You can then adjust the normal maps and specularity using the built in editor. It's really a nice system that's easy to learn.

I may be including some physics-enabled clothing. I am experimenting with a cape and loose pants (currently not deforming properly). 


  

Louisk

Cool proportions on the body!

Mythcons

Thank you, Louisk!

I made a quick 'test' video with some updated features.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OAl-YuY5aVQ

Mythcons

model

InfinityComplex

I like the stylized approach to this one. looking good. 

Mythcons

Thank you, Mr. Complex.

This is the version I'm currently working on. It is drastically different, but is based on the same concept. I am using Fuse as base instead of CC, but it will be imported into iClone. The textures have been hand painted, after I was inspired by a tutorial from Cubebrush.

model

Mythcons

Transferred some of the details back over to Character Creator. Still tweaking the look I want before I 'finalize' him. I am really getting into hand-painted textures.

Mythcons

Cell shading in iClone. I may go this route. You can achieve cell shading by going into iClone and enabling the toon shader. However, for optimal results, I would recommend reducing your texture opacity, dialing up the self-illumination (to about 75%) -- or better yet, creating a new texture set that mimics a cartoon style.

I referenced some One Piece characters and added some 'sketch lines' where appropriate'.