Week 13 : Helping Claws

Howdy Folks,

So this week on game art design has felt quite slow, a different pace than the last few weeks. With the sculpt for the crocodile warrior complete, it was now time to begin retopologizing and unwrapping my character further more as the gaming exhibition EGX Rezzed, was just round the corner, I wanted to make sure I had something to show off.

I started the week just cleaning up some of the rope straps in zbrush to complete the mesh sculpt entirely.

With this complete, I made sure to plan my retopology, for I did not want to make the same mistake that I made with the last character and end up with higher triangle objects and bad optimization. 30K triangles was the aim for the character, with a high concentration around the face and major assets of the character.

Furthermore, I would split the texture sheet into 3, the body with the ropes and jewellery, the armour with the weapons and finally the armour. With this complete it was time to begin retopologizing, I began with the major assets, the crocodile head, the wrap etc. and moved through the rest.

It was a steady and progressive task to work through and it was a joy to see the character come along.

Nevertheless, throughout the process I stumbled into a number of challenges, especially when retopologzing the shoulder guard and the tortoise shell.

Due to their complex shape, it was hard to know where to start and furthermore, how much triangles they would need to capture the silhouette.

Del was very helpful throughout the retopologzing phase, especially with the tortoise shield. He advised that I could do with lowered the triangle count and even use triangles. Since this point I had always been against using triangles just out of habit. Del was kind enough to make an example of how I could retopolgize the shield and with it, I was able to finish retopologizing the shield.

I decided that some assets like the teeth and beads would be duplicated so I would unwrap and texture them as a single asset then duplicate them when complete.

The retopologizing phase was quite challenging, I must admit, especially as many of the assets had very unique shapes- the difficulty was mostly comprehending how I would retopologize them in the most efficient was possible.

The rest of the week I spent, retopologzing the smaller assets, and eventually it began to come together, which was really pleasing.

Besides working retopologzing, I also had the chance to work on the visual development of my project, this included drawing characters and playing around in world machine to create an Aztec environment.

At the end of the week I had the low poly mesh complete in under 30k, which was a great achievement, next week I would begin unwrapping, baking and texturing, I can’t wait.

This weekend I visited the EGX Rezzed video games exhibition in London. I was delighted to visit again, especially after having such a great experience last year. The exhibitor allowed me to meet the developers behind the most exclusive games and further it provided a great opportunity to network.

Throughout the day, I was able to go to many industry talks and even sit in on a developer session on 2 of my favourite games, Total War: Warhammer and Warhammer The End Times: Vermintide.

Getting the chance to play Cameron and Mitch Small’s game, The Balck Death, was fantastic and I cannot wait for the game realise.

I was able to show my work to Kevin McDowell from Creative Assembly and get some great feedback on my work. He made a number of useful comments on my FMP characters especially the Crocodile and Eagle characters. He gave me a number of things to improve on, including:

• Removing the ‘pinch lips’ element of my character

• Adding more displacement to the crocodile head, as it was very flat and not a good reflection of true crocodile head features

• Add more surface detail to the organic assets, they would be very diffused and not as smooth as I had them

This advice was very insightful and I will make the improvements. Among giving the advice, Kevin also made the comment that I was ‘half way there.’ This is fantastic because up until now I wasn’t sure If I wasn’t making progress towards my dream of working for Creative Assembly. So it’s one small step for Denzil Forde, one giant leap for achieving my dreams.

Thanks for reading

See you next week