WIP: test project "Gardevoir"

worksess

Good day/evening everyone, today I mustered enough motivation to chase an old dream of mine of making my own proper videogame calling it "project ALT" for now.

but before even tackling the drawing board for that one I decided to start a small test project that in order to pickup any missing skills that i might need for the main project as well as take note of most creation pitfalls and challenges that i might have to deal with.

Plz bear in mind that im 100% self-taught so might have missed some missing fundamentals or wrong technical

terms, I would appreciate pointing out even smallest mistake or providing any advice that'll helps me improve .

Enter test project "Gardevoir" where I'll be creating one of my favorite characters from the gen3 pokemons and hopefully get to a point where it has:

• a good mesh structure for current modern games as far as polycount and topology goes
  
• have basic locomotion animations (controllable within Unreal Engine)
• customizable to certain extent (making use of the new Mutable Character system within UE5.4)

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After collecting an initial ref board I put together a quick primitive blockout to explore the proportions that Im going after for the character looking for something between (pokemon, overwatch & disney) as far as shape language go

Then I imported those into Zbrush and started working out the silhouette and some of the of the planes bit by bit

Mainly using the "move brush" and the "gizmo tool" and the "pinch brush" while keep all the subtools separate

I Started somewhat defining the secondary shapes to an exaggerated degree (plz excuse my anatomical nonsense xD)  then I might dampen those out as i go

I after reaching a point where Im content with silhouette I decided its time to make the merge for the body subtools and start sculpting on it .

and this marks my "Day1" progress

worksess

====Day2 progress====

• I started refining the mesh of dress, didnt know how to tackle this at first with how dynamesh reacts with small areas at low resolutions so I ended up making it as 2 separate subtools (front+back / sides) then merging after im done playing with general silhouette, I also lifted the side parts up to avoid projection issues later on.

 

after finishing the the dress and adding the meshes for the eye and eyelashes, i decided to experiment with different hair style ideas as Im going to need some customization assets eventually when I start messing with UE5 mutable characters, also i needed to keep things modular and coherent to the style of the base design.

• I ended up making around 5 extra "hair extensions" some might get removed depending on how they behave when imported and simulated later on in UE5.
• finally for the day I did a retopology pass using Zremesher assisted with Polygrouping and Zremsher curves, I still had to do a bit of manual fixing but i was content with the overall result, a 32K tris model for a character+hair+clothing doesn't sound all that unreasonable in modern day games.

and that marks the end of the Day2 progress ..

worksess

====Day3 progress====

• after settling on the final low poly mesh I used UV master in zbrush to get the UVs in place
• then I exported the both a highpoly and lowpoly version of the model and to bake the details within Substance painter, and started painting only within the base color channel as I am still not sure on what shader style im going after within UE5