Model and rig a game character
Ben Erdt and Perry Leijten share their workflow to create a fan art character inspired by the creatures from Unreal Tournament
Ben Erdt Ben is a professional character/creature artist and modeller who is currently working at Guerrilla Games. www.ben-erdt.de Perry Leijten Perry is a technical artist currently working at Guerrilla Games. He started out as an allround artist but later found his passion in rigging and scripting. www.perryleijten.com
As a huge fan of Epic’s Unreal Tournament and its universe, I was keen to explore modelling the fearsome Skaarj for this tutorial project.
From the very first brush strokes in Zbrush to the final rendered image, the following step-by-step breakdown will give you an insight into how this game-ready character was made. You will learn about how Zbrush was used to sculpt the highly detailed body, about the workflow and tools to model the high-poly armour and the final rendermesh inside of Modo. In the accompanying video, which can be downloaded from this issue’s online Vault, I also show you how to use simple macros to make the Modo polygon modelling less click intensive, therefore speeding up your workflow.
I will also share the way I use Marvelous Designer to create the pants and pouch for the character. The tutorial will describe the use of Mari to paint the skin texture as well as how Quixel Suite served as a detail generator for the final armour texture creation inside of Photoshop. My colleague and friend Perry Leijten will take over to share his process for rigging my model for games, including three videos of his process, before I take the project back to show you the passes I render in order to gain full control over the final composition.
To help you further explore our Skaarj project, you can find the complete Maya file with the rigged models as well as my textures in the online Vault. For all the assets you need go to creativebloq.com/vault/3dw206