When designing my characters I took into account the overall theme of my game, being set in a ruined cathedral that has been transformed into a gladiatorial arena I wanted the character to reflect the war-torn environment he inhabits. On top of the apocalyptic style environment I also wanted to utilise a late-80’s early-90’s neon, retro, influence. I like to think I managed to achieve my vision in my designs, it took many iterations and design changes but I’m happy with my outcome.

This was my first rough design for the character, I was going for a more medieval style to the armour.

This image was based more on a Deadpool-esque design for the character, there’s no real reason for this design other than I wanted to try something different to fully clad armour.

For this design I went with a more of a post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” influence. This carried over later to my final designs.

I decided I wanted more interesting silhouettes for my characters designs so I looked into retro 80’s fashion for colour and pattern ideas, and new-romantic/punk fashion for silhouette shapes.

I then started using the pareidolia technique to quickly get some character silhouettes.

The last set of silhouettes also feature some graffiti designs that I wanted my character to have sprayed onto his armour, this will be for representation that the character is a hired mercenary and has no allegiance to a cause or person, instead he takes the armour of people he takes out and defiles it as an act of rebellion.

The bright colours also show that the character is a mercenary. In medieval times mercenaries would wear brightly coloured clothing to distinguish themselves from military knights and I applied this to the design above; it also emphasises the 80’s neon aesthetic I’m going for with the rest of the game.

My next step after finishing the 2D design was to sculpt and High-Poly model the character to get him ready for the final game ready model.

The High-Poly model was done using a mixture of ZBrush, 3DS Max and Marvelous Designer. It’s at this point that I would like to talk about the characters boots, I initially didn’t put much thought into the footwear but whilst modelling I had the idea to base the boots on real-world counter parts; and for that I chose Dr Martens as the inspiration. Below are the reference images I used to model the boots, and a timelapse video of my modelling process.

My final modelling process for the character was to get him game ready, whilst doing this I made a conscious choice to limit my polygon count to 10,000. This was to keep the model optimised and ready for use in VR, and also because the online tool I used to rig and animate the model (mixamo.com) had a file size limit.

During the unwrapping stage I ran into a few issues. Below are two videos of me detailing the problem and how I fixed the issues.

My next process was to texture the model, for this I used Substance Painter 2 and many of the preset materials that come with the software. Utilising my knowledge of material masking and manipulation I created the texture sets for my character, sticking pretty closely to my original design (changing a few colours, patterns and materials in places where it was needed) I had my game ready character textured and ready to be rigged and animated.

For the rigging and animation I used my subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud to utilise mixamo.com to do the majority of the rigging work for me.

Below are some videos of the animation tests that were conducted in engine.

It’s quite hard to make out in the videos but there were some rigging issues with the model, when I get more time I plan on adjusting the skeleton and model to fix the issues.

The next few videos are of myself and fellow student Shane Pengelly working to try and get the character working with the gameplay. This process is still ongoing as of this post, I will post an update when the character is fully implemented.