Meet Floyd! AetherEdge DevBlog

Hey guys! I wanted to write a post about the character I'm working on.

 

Meet Floyd! Don’t let his name fool you, this is one guy you do not want to mess with. Very little is known about his past (even to himself). You might see in him something of a samurai-figure, and like the samurai of yore, he often finds himself defending the weak and helpless. He is motivated toward a murky goal that even he finds it hard to explain. All he has is a direction. Consistently moving toward this location, he often finds himself entangled in the affairs of the other residents that live on Earth (not all of them human), often leading to misunderstanding and conflict.

This character, if you couldn't tell, was heavily inspired by Final Fantasy heroes. My fellow creative leads kept telling me to go back and redesign reference Zack Fair, Zack Fair, Zack Fair, so it's no surprise that my final version of Floyd turned out similar to him. However, the character has several details that are very different from Zack, and our 3D style is so different that I think we'll be okay.

I began roughing in the model as seen above. At first, the face wasn't nearly as developed and the arms were "tube-like". Nonetheless, the roughing phase is always necessary. Half of the model is missing because it is easier to model one side of the character, duplicate it, and flip it when you're pleased with your work. Then you can work in mirror mode from there.

Brought some muscle definition to the torso and arms, added the plate of armor, and for the first go around, tried my hand at having geo sculpted for the hair. We're exploring options, but we're probably going to make the hair fully dynamic using Maya's native hair system.

The model is now highly polished with appropriate edgeflow. The face has more appeal and the hands are highly polished. Modeling continues cleanup until the last minute, but at this point, I began implementing materials. Above is Floyd with his aether "veins". This is achieved with a color corrected glow map, also hooked up to a weak incandescence.

The next challenge was implementing the skin shader. I painted custom maps for Floyd's overall, epidermal, and subdermal layers. There's also a custom backscatter map so we don't get too much subsurface scattering in unwanted places.

Almost completely finished! I wanted to make sure the skin and textures reacted smoothly to something other than default lighting, so I went to the closest and easiest light rig I had: It's my Ember light rig! The skin reacts as expected, so I can move to fine tuning the material properties.