Mega Dimension Ripper 9000 Character Creation

The beginning of the character creation process starts with concepting different character skins. All the artists participated in a skin concept jam. The reason we had a concept jam is that we wanted to come up with more unique ideas for our characters. Then we voted on which skins we wanted to further develop into clear sketches. Once these were determined I started working on and dressing all the characters. 

This initially started with creating a base body that would be the base between all the characters. This was then brought into Z-Brush where I slowly added pieces of clothing and little trinkets for each character. Once it was finished within Z-Brush I lowered the polycount, as some of the objects in Z-Brush started with 20k polygons. From Z-Brush I brought it into Maya to create UV’s and make sure the pivot point is centered before I export it as an FBX. The reason why I brought the FBX into Maya is that Z-Brush doesn’t allow clean UV’s to be created. Once UV’s are done, I would then bring the FBX into Substance Painter to proceed with textures. 

Within Painter I would simply use fill layers with black masks to place the colors. This was the easiest way to get a clean texture map, along with it being easy to color. The colors that were used on the characters were mostly grey scale due to the fact that a tint-map was being used to change their color. A tint-map is created by exporting the Base Color texture into photoshop and coloring it Black/White. Anything that is colored white will show color tinting fully, anything in grey acts like an opacity map for the added color. Anything in black won’t be affected by any color tinting. The tint-map is simply used to color objects and to be able to change them freely without having to make multiple textures for EACH color that is going to be used. With the way I did the textures it was easy to create a tint-map.  

Once all these are exported and colored, they were imported into unreal. Here the textures were linked and the tint-map added. Then the textures were connected to the player models and pulled into a lighting test level. The lighting test is important to make sure the textures are the proper shades and to make sure the tint-map is working properly. Then once everything is confirmed to be working and the textures are clean and flat, they finally replace the temporary models and are considered final.  

-Rylee Maki