Kayen...

...is taking shape :)

This is a project that I've been working on for the last two months, approximately. This blog is going to be a short rundown of what was involved in creating this guy, up to where I am now.

Kayen is being made for several reasons. The first reason being a small competion between me and a friend. See who can create the coolest character, that would be at home in a game like LoL or Smite. It could be a recreation of an existing character or you could design a new one. I designed a brand new one.
Another reason for creating is because it's fun.

The first step to creating him, was a rough sketch. Put simply, I began with a line that felt right. As I had no real restriction as to what the character should do or look like, I could do whatever I felt like.













The first line turned into a series of rough sketches. I modified these in Photoshop to create a concept that felt good. A lot of changes were made to get the right balance in the character and the right sense of scale and mass.

After that, I made a workable modelling sheet. I refined the side-view and created a front-view, based on the side-view.

After that, I made a basemesh to take into Mudbox. I soon found out that Mudbox would not be able to give it the detail i wanted it to have. So I learned how to, very basically, use Zbrush. That pushed the sculpt to new heights. The end result was a sculpt that had more detail and a higher resolution than any of my previous work.

The next step was to create a new low poly model. I also tried to create a fully edgelooped character. This should prove beneficial when I start to animate him. Getting him fully edgelooped meant using far more triangles than I had anticipated. Although not insanely high, by modern standards, it ended up being far higher then I had first envisioned.

the unwrap was created using a plugin for 3DSmax, called Xray Unwrap. Unwrapping was fairly pain free. That meant I could take the new low poly model into Mudbox and start texturing. After several experiments I now have something that works fairly well. I am still not certain I will keep the current colorscheme and I think I'll change it to something brighter.
For the sake of adding mode color and breaking symmetry, I added some warpaint and I will add more. It had proven fairly tricky to get right, as most warpaint means something. So I've had to create a very simple cultural backstory for Kayen.

All this work had taught me a great deal about character creation. A creature, like Kayen, requires much more work then I had thought. It is deeply interesting and gratifying to do, though.