Freelance Year Robot character and ZBrush workshop

After completing my work on the Viking shield I again wanted to explore another area of my skillset that I hadn't really explored, Character Art. The main reasons I wanted to practise character art was to of course understand the workflow better to improve from what I made for the Desy Jennings charity. I also wished wanted to extend my skill past what I did for the charity by first, learning how to manually rig a model rather than you the automatic rigging tools so that I could more accurately rig any characters I make in the future.

Finally I wished to learn how to animate a character to be ready for a game project, mainly how to animate a run cycle, jump and other such common movements found in games. Although I did have an understand of how to use key frames form previous use of the animation tools in the Unreal Engine, Maya and using effects in Moving image arts projects I wanted to learn about specific tools and methods for animating characters.

When I decided upon these objectives I searched and found the perfect tutorial on YouTube, this tutorial by https://www.youtube.com/@GameDevAcademy was a tutorial for modelling, texturing and animating your first character for Unreal, so this matched the goals I wanted to achieve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LgQKFOLzlM&t=6477s

The best aspect I found of this whole tutorial was that it focused on the creation of a mechanical character which meant I could use techniques and tools that I would normally use for props as I didn't have to worry about replicating organic forms. While I was of course following the tutorial I didn't want to just copy as I wouldn't really learn anything, so I did add my own details and used my own method of unwrapping so that I was both practising old techniques and learning new ones.

One of the more useful aspects of the tutorial for my technical skills was that it shown the workflow of actually modelling a character in better detail that the previous tutorial for the Desy Jennings Charity had done, including how to layout character sheets so that I could keep the proportions correct the first time and how to use the translucency tool to edit parts of the model that are hard to select or see when in the regular view.

My technical skills were further improved by the narrator of the video going into very lengthy detail on the rigging menu so that he could explain all the different options afforded to the modeller to create the best skeleton and control rig for their needs, for example he explained how to switch to different rig look form the basic 2D square to 3D cubes or spheres ate the control points. For myself at least I will now use the cube control rig as I find it to be the easiest to use personally.

The texturing process was very straight forward as in the tutorial video the narrator only used the tools in Maya to texture the model but instead I took it into substance painter to practise my skills in that program even then the textures were quite basic due to the simplicity of the model and the most complex part was deciding were to use emissives to make the robot more appealing. The main thing I did learn from this was that I used a premade face texture that came with the tutorial, so I did have to learn about using 2D textures in Substance mainly how to apply them and how to edit them so that they look better on the model without caused dark spots due to it overlapping with other parts of the head.

Overall I found the tutorial to be an excellent tool for improving my technical skills, I learned the proper pipeline for creating a character form modelling to rigging, I learned how to manually rig a model so that the movement is better and so that there wasn't any distortion when the limbs moved and finally I learned multipole new UI and tool setting that will help me work faster like the different control rig styles.

During the process of creating this model I had also signed up to attend a ZBrush workshop held by John Hannon, I joined this workshop for two reasons first it was recommend in the discord server for anyone that was going to do 3D art for their major project in final year which I am going to do, and that when I looked into other artist portfolios I noticed how many would use ZBrush either as a basis or for adding more detail to a model they made in Maya, so I wanted to gain some knowledge of the program from a professional so that I could apply the techniques to future models that I make.

I also listened to advice he was giving about how to more effectively use 3d Substance Painter, with him giving a very in detail demonstration of the tools like generators, anchors, filters and how to make better use on grunges to make a better looking model.