The Gallery

Discover the best new digital art from the CG community

ARTIST

Jake Woodruff

SOFTWARE

3ds Max, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag, Maya

This sporty mech is the work of Jake Woodruff, an environment artist at Playground Games, and Kyle Moody, Cloud Imperium’s lead mocap specialist. Around three months was spent creating the character, with the pair working on it whenever they had time to spare.

“At the beginning I built a library of kitbash parts to build up the high-poly model,” explains Woodruff. “This is something I do on most hard-surface projects to speed up the process and ensure consistent details.”

For Woodruff, the most enjoyable aspect of creating this mech was envisioning a backstory and the world that the character inhabits. “Fleshing out the world informs the visual design, as well as providing context and purpose for everything that’s created.” Much of the character’s design was based on American football helmets and body armour, and Woodruff ensured that each piece of the mech had a practical purpose.

The shoulders limited the range of movement for Moody, who was responsible for rigging, animation and posing. “To get around this I set up a node network which would rotate the shoulder pad joint,” he explains. “If it went beyond its range of motion it would compensate by adding translation to raise and rotate, making it fit the aesthetic and helping me animate within the project’s time frame.”

artstation.com/theatmosphere