The making of

For this blog, I will show how far I am with my model and the journey in creating my character model for my game.

1. Styleguide

I began by gathering inspiration and putting together a style guide. Luckily I only needed two images because my game is heavily inspired by The long dark, and I wanted my character to look like it came straight out of the same universe.

2. Creating the model

After gathering the images and my own concept art, I began sculpting his head. I started with a base model from the internet (I've searched everywhere but couldn't find where I got it from). With the base model, I did a paint-over to get more of a feeling of how he should look and get a sense of his basic facial features.

After the paint-over, I began sculpting. After 2,5 hours, I had something I was satisfied with.

The next day I did the hair and some tweaking, and the sculpture was done.

The next step was for me to retopo the head. In the end, I was quite happy with the result.

With the head done, I bought a base body from Turbo squid (Made by Lurisay), stylized feet(Made by Snscgworks), and stylized hands from flipped normals (Made by Joao Sousa).

With these models, I began merging them. Because I'm not using normals for baking in the details, I used the high poly models of the hand and feet and reduced the poly count to connect the vertices better, so It kept the higher poly shape.

I probable will revisit the model to improve the topology.

After I was done merging all sections, I started unwrapping the character. 

3. Time to paint

For the texture, I wanted to experiment with how I textured my model, so I used "Texture paint" and began to lay a foundation.

As you can see, the skin tone is inhumanly white, almost pure white, But that's what I liked about the stylized look from "The long dark." that's the style I fell in love with.

I added some shading for muscle definition and chest hair for more detail. Originally I wanted to make his hair black, but when I was shading it, it looked more like he had gray hair. So instead, I changed it to brown. But brown didn't do it for me either, So I returned to the drawing board and searched for some image references from "the long dark." I took some Images and saw that nothing in their game is pure black but more of a gray-blue-ish color. So I color-picked the colors from the bear and used them for his hair.

I still need to finish the hair, but I added a base layer and will finish it later.

With the base texture done, I wasn't satisfied with the underwear, so I googled references for underwear.

I'm still unsatisfied with the backside, but I'll fix that part later.

4. Scars of the past

And for the last part, which has taken most of my time researching and developing. The backstory for the scars and burn marks. I love making a backstory for my character to step into their mind about what happened to them in the past, like physical and mental trauma. About what they like and dislike. What their hobbies are, and what motivates them.

For all the scars, I'll tell you my general thought process. This way, I won't spoil the story/game. Later, I will make a biography of him and flesh it out further. I love that the player will discover the history and small tidbits of the main character.

These two scars were created when he was doing one of his pastime activities. I googled the injury based on the activity to determine what the scars should look like. After the research, I would do a paint-over to experiment with different shapes.

I already knew what I wanted the leg scar to look like. Therefore, I didn't need to draw different shapes.

Without spoiling too much, there was an explosion. And I created a visual simulation in Blender to see where his injuries would be. I just made a store with a front shop, angled the characters in the position I wanted, and drew some lines to estimate where he would be injured.

After that, I researched the different types of burn marks. But I didn't find many examples when researching burn marks drawn or painted, so the picture below is the only good one for my style guide. I did a quick paint-over to see how it would look and was satisfied.

I did the same thing as in the example to see where the burn marks would form. I made a visual simulation to show where the burn marks would be severe and where they would be less severe.

5. What's next

I will texture his hand and feet and finish the burn mark on his back. At last, I will fix some topology and tweak minor things like the texture and model. Lastly, I will complete it by giving him an armature.