King Of The Dead: Trying And Failing To Not Make A Political Statement

Halloween is edging closer and, oddly enough, our Week 2 and 3 project is following that theme quite nicely. King Of The Dead is the title of our first group-based project in second year and, I think it's fair to say that it was fairly challenging for me. Group work can often be quite difficult; clashing opinions, clashing personalities and different ideas. Although our group suffered from all of those, we still managed to produce a great piece of work at the end.

The brief itself asked for three different things: a character, a throne and a backdrop/wall. We, of course, needed to populate our scene as well. We had four people in our group, so we were able to set each person their own area to focus on.

We flitted from idea to idea at the beginning of the project. After our initial brainstorm, we settled on a mexican day of the dead gameshow, which quickly picked up some aztec influence.

I worked on concepting the character. However, we felt the whole idea wasn't really clickling, so we decided to switch it to a wage slave idea.

Again, after some discussion, we decided that it wasn't going in the direction we wanted, so we finally settled on a corrupted politician, which quickly evolved to a warmongering military general. My desperate need to make some kind of political statement accidentally won out.

I was tasked with creating the character. We wanted a lot of focus on the face and the silhouette of the character, so I decided to work first on the head, taking a lot of inspiration from political cartoons, caricatures and the tv show Splitting Image. I made a small pinterest board with some inspirational images on it.

Once the face shape had been decided on, I tailored the rest of the silhouette around that. From there I worked on the outfit designs. We seemed to settle on the more angular, sharp face.

After this was one, I drew up some orthographics so I could begin modelling.

Then I modeled the character in 3ds Max, giving myself a tri budget of 15,000, paying close attention to the topology.

Then, onto the textures. After last weeks PBR practice, we decided to keep on the same track and practice some more PBR work. Skin and fabric, I learnt quickly, were incredibly difficult to get right. My texture budget was three 2048x2048 materials including albedo, metalness, roughness and normals. I did end up taking the face into zbrush to refine it a little. As we'd decided on making the face a central feature, the rest of the character was less important and likely to be hidden in shadow, allowing me to focus my attention on one specific thing.

Everyone else in my group did a fantastic job and, although many of us had differing opinions, we still managed to bring the project together and produce a really good end result.

Our final chosen image.

Due to us changing our idea, we iterated repeatedly, making sure we got the best result. On the other side of this, however, it left less time for the modelling, texturing, and engine work. I am relatively happy with the overall result but there are so many areas I would improve.

           

I was happy with the overall design of the character. The concepting stage I thoroughly enjoyed and I got the opportunity to explore some interesting characters with the change of ideas. I was also pretty happy with the character model I produced. The topology was pretty neat and the face was particularly fun to construct. Our final image, I believe, was well constructed as well and shows off the work that each member of the team put in.

There were, however, many areas I would've liked to improve. 

The textures were my biggest problem. As I mentioned before, our idea being changed a few times meant that I didn't have as much time as I would've liked to actually produce the model. This meant that my textures suffered. I also needed to make my unwraps more efficient. It would've greatly improved the overall look of my textures. Our time constraints also meant that I was unable to include some of the details in the character that I wanted. 

           

I do plan on remaking this character for a portfolio piece, spending a little more time on him and taking him into zbrush to work on the normal maps and spend a lot of time defining the materials in Unreal 4. With a little more work I'm pretty sure that this character could really be something good so, keep an eye on this space to see if he gets any better.