Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Strife! WIP01

The one Darksiders character I really wanted to make while at Vigil but never got the chance to was Strife. I was really looking forward to the possibility of working on Darksiders III with him as the main character (or better yet, 4 player co-op!). Sadly, we never got to that point.

 I've been wanting to explore a few new techniques (mostly hard surface, rendering, surface materials, and hair) and thought why not do a Strife bust! This will be an ongoing project and I'll try to post my progress along the way.

Strife - Here is my reference sheet. The artists shown are:
Joe Mad - JoeMadFan.com
Paul Richards - Autodestruct.com
Ludo Lullabi - LudoLullabi.deviantart.com


I'm going to give my own spin to the character while staying true to his key features. I really liked the shorter nose piece and what I read as oculars on the crest of his helmet in the original piece that Joe drew. I'm also going to work green into him a bit more (mostly his collar). We had started linking key colors to the four horsemen while developing Darksiders II. War was Red, Death was Purple, Strife - Green, and I think we had Fury as Yellow.

Here is where I'm at with him (I will be doing his collar too). He's prepped and ready to go back into ZBrush:


And here is a progress shot of my steps:


• Blank - Quick basic mesh I could throw into ZBrush and get started on fleshing out the design
• DynaMesh - I spent about 20 minutes and roughed in the general shapes I wanted in Zbrush using DynaMesh. At this stage I'm not worried about being perfect at all. I just want to establish my shapes for retopo.
• Retopo - Once I've got my rough sculpt, I retopologize to create a mesh I can take into Max for refinement. Again, in this stage I focus more on speed than making anything perfect. My only real concern is maintaining my quads.
• Base Mesh - I've cleaned up my mesh and have prepped it for a final pass in Zbrush.

Well on to Sculpting!




6 comments:

  1. Hi Bobo! Is this the same workflow you use in production? For example is this something you use more for precision and when speed counts do you use another workflow method? Thanks, Love your work!

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  2. Good to see you working on him I was wondering how he and the last horseman would look.
    Hope to see much more soon, awesome stuff man keep on trucking.

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  3. Hey I was wondering, do most of the models you make for game companies requires retopologizing? I find it cool to sculpt out models and retopo them as well. Even though retopologizing takes good minute for me lol

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  4. Amazing Brian!

    I have a doubt watching your final result wireframes.

    The forehead part looks subdvided, and there are some hard edges that don't look like they where chamfered.

    Can you kindly clarify this?!

    Thanks!

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    2. I was thinking the same thing looking at the goblin model. Like there's hard edges but no chamfered edge? Well I just figured it out. Where you add the subdivision surface there's a checkbox for 'separate by smoothing groups'. That will add the hard edges without adding extra loops (providing you set the smoothing up). I'm just coming back to max after 10 years of Maya so I'm just now remembering all this stuff! More blog updates please Bobo!

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