Alien Politician - SciFi Character [ DONE ]
interpolator
Hey Polycounters 
I'm working on a new personal project.
My intention is a realistic or lets say beliveable realtime character. The design is currently based on a combination of a human and different animal parts to create an interesting looking shape.
I started with a bust sketch to define the character and at the moment I'm working on a concept to block out the body and cloth style.
I really enjoy the idea of making an alien shaped character with more humanoid clothes, how does a long leg character put on pants?
Stay tuned for updates and C&C is allways welcomend
I'm working on a new personal project.
My intention is a realistic or lets say beliveable realtime character. The design is currently based on a combination of a human and different animal parts to create an interesting looking shape.
I started with a bust sketch to define the character and at the moment I'm working on a concept to block out the body and cloth style.
I really enjoy the idea of making an alien shaped character with more humanoid clothes, how does a long leg character put on pants?
Stay tuned for updates and C&C is allways welcomend
Replies
I started with the blockout of the overall body proportions, I really enjoy the process of adding base shapes and move them into the right position
For the feet I think I will go into some kind of long fingers with floating skins between to still show the see creature background of this species. Over the millions of years... this race is now a fast runner.
Thank you and sure here is a first sheet for the cloth parts.
I really like the idea of a victorian style with bulgy pants and ornaments. The materials are modern out of a futuristic material ... But I hat huge problems with "normal pants and these legs
Can't wait to start the cloth blockout ^^
working on the aarm shapes. I really like the idea of combined fingers, Looks like an evolutional thingy
Also I made a silhouette tes. So far I like what I'm seeing ....
I'm still not happy with the overall shape and I had a few problems with the questions of how this character moves, does the center of gravity works etc.
So I started a new interation. I think I will change the feet too. I like this shape because noch I have also more volumes for baroque clothes ^^
I think I go with this anatomy. I like the feet ( it's based on an ostrich bird) and each hand has two thumbs
I blended all the volumes together and reshaped the main volumes a little bit more. Furthermore I pushed the shape of the ankle to have a more interesting shape.
Well and a question would be toenails yes or no .....
And yes the neo baroque .... I like the clothes of this century and the rich environmental design. Soo I want to create a mix between scifi and baroque. That means neon light ... metal for cloth parts but also pattern for walls and fabrics.
new update stuff. I finished the hand volumes so the body is basicaly finish and I can start with the retopo.
And because I like rendering here are a few new images
And yes there are flying in small baby cribs.
I'm working ( very slowly) on the retopo of the head. Because I want to make facial expressions for the presentation I put a lot of time into the planing of the edgeflow. This time I tried a different workflow (because I'm lazy and I hate retopo ^^)
I used the Head Basemesh from Wrap, because of the nice edgeflow, and made cuts to seperate different areas for the face like mouth/ nose, eyesockets, cheek area etc.
Then I wrapped those geo patches on top of my mesh and made tweaks via move brush and projections in Zbrush.
I have to fill the missing areas and stitch every patch together but the base line is now established.
Also ( with a pair of fresh eyes from my girlfriend) I think the butt is to heavy for the overall shape.
I reduced the size about 50% and I must confess that I love the new shape. It looks now more interesting and it's better to read.
Furthermore I reprojected all the current details on the new topology.
Next step ... body. Lucky me I only have to take care of the arms, hands and feet because the rest of the torso will be only important for the cloth simulation.
I'm working on the body retopo. Using single patches works pretty well for me. Most of the time I just have to create the inbetween patches. But I still have a lot of the mesh to cover ^^ ...... why I made such a big shape
Can't wait to start with the Hand ...I'm excited if my two thumb topology will work properly ...
Keep going! Looking forward to seeing the outfit designs you come up with.
@Joseph_Bramlett
Yeah the tile seems a little bit confusing, I will call it Alien Baroque!
Yes the nuckles will be more detailed but I don't know if I should really build round edgeloops for the definitions in terms of to many 6 sided edges and the pinching in Zbrush during the subdvision.
@Will_Maccabe
Glad you like it. I'm also looking forward to start with the cloth. I think I will start crying because of sewing patterns ^^
Oh and here is an update of the hand .. almost done!
I used the digital human eye shader as base for my own version to hand ebigger eyes.
The bake is done, now I have to work on the albedo.
HP sculpt
Engine devlook
Why ...why I sculpted so many fancy shapes???
But when this is done, I can finally reproject my current highpoly on the new topology and then bring my character in the right scale and I can start working on the cloth shapes!
I made a few changes on the fly to have later better deformations in the face.
Furthermore I set up my Materials for Zbrush. It is really nice that you can use material data to create polygroups.
Which helps me a lot when it comes to the shaping and cleaning of the mouth corners.
I prepared two images to show you the current and hopefully final edgeflow of the face.
Maye (that could be an interesting Idea) I use the highpoly head also to make a rough skull shape to define better which parts are bone and where are the soft areas. Could be useful to understand and lay down the movement of the facial expressions
small update. I reporjected the initial sculpt on the new basebody and I started to refine her facial volumes. I tried to work with less hard edges, onstead I gave her face a more round areas.
currently I'm working on the cloth stuff ^^ I guess it's my second work with Marvelous because in the past I just sculpted jackets, pants etc.
Also it is a huge challenge for me to make a cloth design that would work in real.
So herea a a few screenshots for you guys
The cloth base is almost finished. In these Corona days I have barely time to work on my project but after next week I'm able to post new images and carry on working on her.
finally an update since my home office is over. I had the work pc at home so I couldn't work on my own stuff. for almost 4 weeks.
But anyway here is a cloth preview. I reworked the overall design and made the gament pieces. was a lot of fun and I really enjoy marvelous in terms of picking an corner and more it around in realtime ^^ The side part was a tricky one because It has to be stiff and so I build extra geometry to match my design idea.
Concept ( also now slightly different as the geometrie but I'm fine with it)
Zbrush preview
Thank you
I think I will add some geometrie details later but first I have to make the retopo and the reprojection of the folds.
Thank you I appreciate it
finally I have cleaned and reprojected all the cloth pieces on my new sculpting friendly topology. Oh boy sometimes is working with clothes a tricky thing.
Anyway, here is the latest highpoly screenshot. I will now start detailing the cloth and skin parts. Hmm also I need teeth and jewelery for the character ...
Stay tuned for more!
I made today a few scribbles to play with an idea for her eyelashes/eyebrows and also head jewellery designs
update time ....
I modeled the eyebrow/ tentacle thingys and also I made concepts for other Jewellery stuff
I worked further on my project, adding head/feet jewellery details and buttons for the jacket, giving her finger and toenails oh and I made the tentacle antennas for her head.
Also I made a few more devlook renderings and I think I'm going with an golden jacket lining material to break up the overall bluish tone and creating a more interesting contrast. And fuck I love it!
For the rendering I also painted the piping to create a better visual guide for the further steps.
Hey,
I found the time to make the piping geo for the cloth borders. I had slightly reshape a few pieces to fit perfectly with the piping geo.
The jacket detail in the middle and the piping line on the leg will be just baked into the normal map, that will reduce my headaches in terms of bending issues later.
So here is an oven fresh turnaround
Furthermore I deleted two eyebrow tentacles, because it was too busy on the front area. Instead I made eyebrow horn pieces to frame the eye sockets.
And I went to the feet because it was still in the base shape status and now I made a more organic structure with big wrinkles to mimic movement and create an organic feeling.
That's it for now, stay tuned
current status of my project ...
I'm working on the refinement of the clothes and skin parts. I Added the biggest volumes and wrinkles for the skin because I want this as part of my later bake process.
The pores and smaller skin details will be made within substance painter, because I then I have a better controll of the detail dimensions and can tweak faster compared to a pure sculpted mesh.
What I really enjoyed was the sculpting of her lips, her face has now more depth and looks natural.
For the baking and texturing process, I duplicated her head and made an slightly open mouth position too.
Now I can bake without cleaning normal maps in small areas like mouth corner and also I was able to reshape her lipline better than I would be able to do with a closed mouth.
Here are a few detail pictures :
If i could say anything (i am no master) i feel that she would not be able to actually "function" with these feet.
Want to say perhaps (like the hand) adding two support toes towards the back of her feet(small or big). (the styling is up to you of-course).
If anyone knows of a creature with two different digit counts on the lower extremities and the upper i'd really like to see it.(i can't think of one,atm.)IRL.
Otherwise i really like what you are doing here, adding the extra bits if you choose to do it won't be too much of a headache, with go'Z' or any other method of your choosing.
Was going to say you did all that detailing on the body to cover it up with clothing at 1st was a bit disappointing so i hope to see in the final some renders of that along with the clothing. (In the thoughts of, i do not see animals going out of their way to cloth their, bodies, is my reasoning and doubt they would see their bodies as something to cover up, seems like only a human thing...to me so you humanized an alien in my view.) I know fun imagination and i am thinking too much into it, i do that sometimes, trying to stop.
Your artwork though
Reason i said anything about the feet is because if someone where to push her backwards she would fall over in my eyes.(maybe my eyes are broken atm, its sunday.)
Thank you for your very interesting feedback
Your toughts about her feet are great. My inspiration and main reference was an ostrich, but I will think about an supporting toe, oooh better I will make a test sculpt to mimik the combined fingers also as toes.
And yes you are right, I "humanise" that alien but is it a human thing to develop a culture and also develope speech, math, art and cloth? I like the idea that not every alien specie's is a wild creature with big teeth
They would move about in their natural forms because the need for covering would be beneath them and primitive, (as well as be blocking natural nutrients from say the sun, which it currently does to us irl now.).
I can go deeper into people that get burned from the sun and the reason is their diet but i'll stop here.
Appreciate the feedback, looking forward to more, i probably won't address anything further just wanted to see the response to an alternative view about aliens and clothing. If anyone is working on an alien try making organic "suits", that might be a little more (independence day) but it does make more sense(doesn't cause a pollution concern).(thinking about this now, with biodegradable clothing even if still experimental puts a wrench into my concern.)
it's time for an update!
I polished a few areas of the cloth pieces and worked slightly on the feet design. Therefore I added dew claw toes to have the same shape language as I already using for her hands.
I think the Highpoly is now done, next step will be the lowpoly and unwrapping magic.
currently I'm working on the retopo of my character, I looking for unnesecarry polygons and build shapes that follows the folds better to support the normal map on top but doesn't look to flat from the 3/4 view.
The head is a tricky one, because I'm working with a mouth open head for the bake, I have to use a mouth closed blendshape which means I have to prepare later a retopo head with the same vertex Ids and topoligy to be able to project the pose.
Anyway, here a a few screen grabs from the retopo version
And a test bake of the head
Thank you very much!
Every piece is coming together and the LoL character looks indeed pretty interesting, thanks for the inspiration
it's texturing time!
All bakes came out really smooth with just a tiny amount of corrections in really small areas. I started to layout the overall colour shemes and materials for the pieces and I'm very happy watching how every piece come together.
Here are a few images of the current status of her clothes.
Also I imported a new version into a fresh unreal project to test my texture values. I also used the eyes I made a few month ago but I'm not soo happy with the design, maybe I will jump back to eyes without any iris like a plane colour with a colour gradient or I will use a round iris and pupil instead.
Here are a few screengrabs from unreal
a few things has chanched after my last update....
I tweaked further the skin textures, I added different eyes ( now in a darker golden tint because I like it more)
I added a tearduct mesh for the watery eye effect ... and I did other smaller changes to polish my character bit by bit