[WIP] Overwatch Widowmaker Fanart Skin

Surrow

Hello to my fellow polycounters!

I’ve been working on a character in the evenings after my day-job, in hopes of pushing my portfolio forwards. In the past I’ve either had a fairly generalist portfolio, or the chosen designs were not visually strong. I’ve reflected a lot lately, and decided to push forwards with a stylized character art portfolio, focusing on Overwatch and Overwatch-style characters.

To kick off this off, I’ve picked this fanart skin design of Overwatch’s Widowmaker done by Louzelia Almeida (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oA1Q6L) which I think has a fairly strong visual design, and gives me room to tackle some interesting design challenges. I’ve given myself some constraints and challenges, around which I’m focusing this project:

Constraints

- Game-ready character, whilst keeping hair and cloth animation/physics requirements in mind. Way too often do I see game-ready portfolio characters where the hair or cloth only works for one pose.
- Hair Geometry and UVs should support anisotropy, meaning they’d likely have to be relatively straight topology.
- Emulating Overwatch’s Character Skin workflow, as shared on conference talks by Blizzard. This means heavy focus on blockout and Sub-D modelling. Basically, I’m intending to push it as far as I can without the need of sculpting outside of a few select areas.

Challenges

- Keeping the character recognisable, even with a fanart skin. There are several unresolved design challenges in the concept, some of which are core to Widowmaker’s silhouette and readability.
- Learning Blender. I figured that It might be beneficial knowing free 3D software, particularly if freelancing is an option in the future. Also, I’ve kind of forgotten how to use 3DsMax and decided I might as well use this opportunity to finally get over my avoidance of learning Blender.

I’m working about 10h per week on the character, whilst keeping track of time and progress. The complete blockout took me about 38h, alongside learning Blender’s quirks. I’m not rushing, which is a blessing to be honest, but at the same time makes me wonder how long it ideally should take. I know Speed comes with practice, and definitely something I want to build up for my next project.

When I initially blocked out the character I went for a full box-modelling approach. Later on I’ve come to the conclusion that when working on a character skin, the base geometry would likely be provided - so that’s when I decided to continue the body in zBrush. 

I’ve taken the whole blockout to zBrush, but only finished the highpoly for the body. The rest of the blockout was a nice placeholder to use as reference though. I’ve also worked more on the hair, to get a better idea of how I could approach the curls. In the end, I had hair that seems to work but was quite messy. Overall, that’s about 20h going into the character for sculpting. 

At this point I started running into a couple if difficulties, since I’ve been following the concept art fairly closely, and only now noticed a few inconsistencies. There’s no space for the visor, since the curls are covering the area where it would normally sit. The arm guard is not contributing to the silhouette and the hair in the concept is quite bulky, with a strange transition towards the scalp. Obviously all of these need to be tackled, since there’s no point sweeping them under the rug now.

To keep the character recognisable, I’ll be heavily leaning into the arm guard and weapon to carry. There’s only one other Overwatch Widowmaker skin (”Sylvanas”) which doesn’t have a visor, and instead have her eyes glow read. Some other skins work around it with having glasses on the head, which they then pull down. I’ve tried out different setups with hair-pins and masks as I want to keep the curls the way they are; though none of them really convince me yet. I might rely either on the flower crown to keep the design tight, or perhaps approach it with some slim glasses.

For the hair I decided to take a step back, and refined the blockout to match the reference more closely. I wanted to get a better understanding of the silhouette and flow before I reconstruct it with a cleaner spline-based setup. I tried to keep the overall aesthetic of the hair style, but am hesitant to push it further because of the constrains I would encounter with anisotropy. From my understanding, for the setup to work correctly I’d need relatively straight topology, with which I can straighten the UVs. I’m not sure if that would be possible if several strands were merged into more complex, irregular topology. On that note, I've noticed that there are very few characters in Overwatch with curls, if at all. I wonder whether this is because of the anisotropy, a technical constraint, or a stylistic choice. 

That said, here’s a before and after for the hair refinement.

Originally, the concept doesn’t have an arm guard and instead goes for a pointy glove. The current glove is a rough blockout, and I haven’t yet refined it hence why the fingertips and seams are not refined. There wasn't much emphasis on the silhouette in the concept and since this is such an iconic part of Widowmaker’s design I decided that it's important to add and push the design further. I tried to get the aesthetic from the weapon across in the arm guard design whilst referencing Overwatch 2 skins, but it doesn’t quite fit into the overall theme but I'm not sure why. Here are the references vs my design, and please ignore the underlying glove geometry which is cutting through: 




Overall, I've spent about 72h on the project without rushing. I anticipate this project will be done around summer time, but I have no hard deadline outside of daily consistency. Reflecting on what I've done up to this point, and feedbacking myself I can notice that:

- I could simplify the curves of the hair, and will do some paint-overs.
- I'm heavily leaning towards scrapping the mask and instead use slim red-tinted glasses to make a reference to the visor. I’m intending to have it in one or two renders only, so not a permanent part of the design.
- The arm guard shape needs stronger primary forms. There's lot of repetition going on in the layering, and too little contrast between them. Time to do more paint-overs!

I’d love hearing your general thoughts, feedback, and/or observations. I welcome direct, non-sugar-coated critique. I’m trying to be quite meticulous with this project, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something that I’ve not yet touched upon deeply enough. Some points I’m particularly looking forward to are, but not exclusively, are:

- Advice on how to approach the design philosophy of the arm guard; I’m having difficulties breaking away from the reference. Which parts are the ones that break the design continuity in this case?
- Feedback on the blockout approach, and how I can push the quality and usability of my block outs. In the past, my blockouts were done in zBrush and prioritised volumes rather than usable geometry, so this is fairly new to me. 
- Are there any areas in regards of anatomy that I should refine more before calling the body done? 

Many thanks to you all!