Devlog: Week 4

Hello everyone, my name is Chloe. I am one of two character and concept artists working on this project.

My project roles are as follows:

• Creating character concept art
• Sculpting and modeling high poly, detailed character models
• Handling the retopology of those characters and baking high poly details onto low poly meshes
• Texturing character models
• Handling rigging and animations

Character Sculpting and modeling:

For this project, I created three designs and models for our main characters but for the majority of this week I’ve been mainly focusing on retopology of our beloved dragon guide and his boss form.

The step-by-step process:

1. Typically, when I start creating character models I like to start out with creating a high poly sculpt from scratch in Zbrush. I like to start out this way because there are a lot of benefits from creating a character sculpt and the high poly sculpt stores a lot of data that I can bake down onto a low poly version of the mesh when I bring everything over to Substance painter for texturing
2. Next, I focus on retopology. This creates a low poly version of the sculpt!
3. Next, I UV the model and create two separate instances of the file (one containing the high poly sculpt and the other containing the low poly retopo).
   
4. Then after that, I bake the normals from the high poly sculpt down onto the low poly model and texture the character!
5. After that, I create a rig and animations for the character.

 For this week I focused on the retopology of our dragon guide’s boss form, as it’s really important for animation purposes to maintain clean edge flow around certain areas like the eyes and mouth for example.