FMP - Week 3 - Part 4

Nearly there - more and more detailing in Zbrush and Overwatch fabric/material studies. 

Here is an update on where I am with my Overwatch character so far, I often find that as a 3D artist, its at this part of the project as well as sometimes during texturing that you realise whether you have a good concept image or not. 

I've frequently in the past fallen into the trap of: "Oh it doesn't matter that this concept image doesn't have orthographics or much detail, I can use my own artistic liberty!"

As you can assume, that idea would inevitably come back to bite me and it was at the detailing phase of my high poly that it often did. While it's important to practice your skills of improvisation and intuition when it comes to working from concept images as a 3D artist, as we've been repeatedly told by our tutors, if you can avoid it there is no reason why you should make things harder for yourself by choosing a hard concept. 

By 'hard' I mean that the concept should ideally have at least two different perspectives of the character, be fully coloured, rendered and if you're lucky, should have a close up image of any points of interest such as the face or weapon. 

I learned that it must be no coincidence that this is exactly how concepts are shown in industry as well, as not only do they look beautiful, but they are also lovely to work with as there is very little to no room for doubt or error. 

Note to self: when in doubt, check your concept!!

So anyway, the importance of concept images ramble aside, here is where I've gotten thus far: 

Focusing mainly on reworking the jacket creases and a lot of the mechanical parts of her body, I'm vinally pleased with the jacket after taking some time to look for references of how Blizzard artists did their characters. 

My main reference was the very same reference I used for the character's bangs, the 'Casual' Hanzo skin, as the trousers in the image were exactly the type of texture I was looking for. 

I also marked the seam line down the front of his trousers because I really liked the way that it looked and it very much sold the art style of Overwatch with the addition of the slight diagonal line and I wanted to add that into my character. 

I worked on the shoulder pad on her left shoulder shown above, as well as the mechanics on the character's spine shown below, adding seams to her bodice and leggings. 

For the fur of her jacket I debated layering alphas as the artists did with Mei's character model, but after referring back to my concept I remembered that while Mei's collar and trimmings are more in the style of bear fur, my character's collar was aimed more towards the sheep's wool collar similar to Tracer's. So I instead decided to add just a little texture with my high poly and leave the rest to the texturing I will do later. 

And here is 3/4 screenshot of my progress so far.