Garrus Vakarian - Mass Effect
So during my free time in the past few months I've been working on my own design for Garrus from the Mass Effect series. I'm just 2/3rds of the way done with him. I've just finished texturing his torso piece. If all goes well, this material can be applied to the rest of his hard-surface armor with minimal effort.
Sculpted in Zbrush, hard-surfaced in 3ds Max, textured with Substance Painter, and rendered with Vray.
Here are some full-body renders
For fans of the Mass Effect series, you might notice that his proportions here are slightly different from the game. Let me explain why:
In the original game models, many of the characters were largely animated using mocap. Since the people doing the mocap were of course humans, all the humans and human-like characters were designed and rigged with similar skeletons and proportions, to make transferring animations from one character to another much easier. But this also limited the design of the alien characters, who had to have body proportions similar to that of humans. From a game development point of view, it was practical.
(In the picture below, I rescaled both images so that they are of the same height. As you can see, their joint placements and bone proportions are more or less the same.
But scientifically this wouldn't make sense, as beings who evolved from another world would most likely develop different body proportions which would suit their environments better. Therefore, in my own version of Garrus I took the liberty of making him look more alien and less human -- longer legs and torso, bigger hands, wider shoulders, thinner waist, and an overall taller physique. But I was careful to not overdo it, as I still wanted to maintain his familiar appearance.
If all goes well I should be able to finish him before Christmas. Feedback and critique is always welcome!
Replies
So I realized that a similar topic I made already exists here:
https://polycount.com/discussion/228805/wip-garrus-vakarian-mass-effect#latest
What happened was I made that topic, but didn't appear in the forums for several days. So I thought it didn't get posted, which is why I made this new one just now. Sorry, my mistake. Can the mods remove the old one if it's a problem? Thanks.
Done! Looking neat so far.
Thanks and thanks!
Love what you're doing with the proportions, but feel like you should do a bit of pushing to the proportions of the face as well. Looking great so far.
Thanks. I actually tried that out. But even slightly changing his face made him feel like a different character from the one in the games, who every Mass Effect fan knows and loves. And I want to retain that familiarity. When I show this to someone who's played Mass Effect, I want them to instantly recognize his face even if the rest of him is slightly different.
I've done some progress on him today. I'm still changing up the materials on his armor in 3ds Max while I work on the texture maps in Substance Painter.
Having developed my own way of setting up the Vray materials helps a lot. By just changing the Mat IDs, I can switch around the materials on the armor in just a few clicks -- all while retaining the dust, grime, scratches, dull areas, and other imperfections exported from Substance Painter
I've finally finished his bust. Now I just need to work my way down.
Finally. Next will be his guns and other equipment.
Admittedly I'm not as good with weapons as I am with characters. But I do what I must, and I could use the practice.
The pistol is pretty basic. I did this in 1 day. But it's enough for my needs.
Changed the color scheme. I think I like the gray and black scheme better.
And also the wires!
And he is done. Rendered in his full badass glory. More pics to come.
Another shot of my favorite Mass Effect squadmate.
So it's the last day of 2021, and I'm finally calling this one finished. It's been a great project for me. I've also uploaded many of these renders on my Artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vJbyXv?fbclid=IwAR3dfdbN6_LkngfSNc6RXc_GUdMt7jS5TuY-HNoyGseJ4clvtbTiQpW0feo