Making of Our Main Character: Cu Chulainn!

This blog post outlines the creation workflow developed within the program for our final game project. Prepared by Lead Artist Elizabeth Guerrero Mendoza, UPC student specializing in technical art.

Concept & Planning

The first part before everything was to get the overall feeling of the character and after some research and brainstorming, there were some proposals based on the character’s first concept.

The idea was to adapt it more into a 3d model, whether that be accentuate proportions, check if there’s too much noise in certain areas and iterate how the whole silhouette reads, plus adding more storytelling in the general looks.

High Poly Sculpting

Here it was to find the flow in some areas of the concept such as the fur and hair, or the shoulderpad, that took many trials and errors, a modified plane, a base in Maya, a sphere, the sun rays different meshes, a personal preference is to jump between topogun and zbrush to keep a shape I like and polish to make sense in geometry, same with the body, and plenty of pieces, basically all of them save for the hair and fur, once I had that, then did I went all in on the HP details.

Retopology & UV Unwrapping

With my workflow of jumping between programs I did most of the retopo side by side with the HP, the only thing that really took a while was the hair/fur so when the UVs had to be done, they could be understood nicely what was each part.

Also perfect time to do a quick test in Mixamo, just to make sure the model deforms okay before texturing.

Baking

For a better bake everything was arranged in explode.

Texturing

What zbrush to topogun, substance to photoshop, jumping from one to another. Creating a grayscale material that then I can send to photoshop to add colors where it’s way faster to iterate. Once pleased with the result, send it back to Substance Painter for polishing small details and review the PBRs (Physically-Based Rendering) making sure the metal looks metallic, leather rough, etc. Also where I made final tweaks, like giving him a meaner frown or simplifying the colors after getting feedback.

Rigging, Posing and Presentation

I made a basic rig, which later turned into the first iteration of many, but that’s another story, very specific to what I wanted to showcase here such as, eyebrows ears and the 2 bangs to each side, the weight paint was still a test at this time.

And Voila! We have our main character ready for the first tests of animation!

Elizabeth Guerrero Mendoza, Lead Artist at Centuria Games