Another Character

I’ve been stalling.  I haven’t touched my game in over a week so I’ve taken some time today to create the wise old ghostly guide character. It started out as a sphere believe it or not. I wasted a lot of time trying to find the best method to “sketch” a character in ZBrush because on a Sunday I just couldn’t be bothered to model some sort of idea in Maya first.

I eventually, after some faffing and a bad case of indecision, I just pulled in a sphere – who knows WHERE I got it – and started sculpting. After a few dynamesh flicks I ended up with what you see below.

I’m actually very happy with this. Don’t get me wrong, there are a LOT of things I didn’t even think of like scale, where’s he pointing, how he’ll be animated… all things that will bite me later! But damn this isn’t bad for a day’s work (He says tooting his own horn).

I’ve settled into a bit of a pipeline – nothing set in stone, I mean, it’s only me. I had to take the low res mesh into UV Layout to do the UVs and then I’d taken both low and high res meshes into Substance Painter and threw on some materials I thought were appropriate. After that I masked out the sections I felt they should be on, painted out the eyes for the glow, and exported. It took me a few hours but I got the end result I wanted. I can’t imagine painting these textures without Substance Painter.

I took a lot of inspiration from Mufasa for his styling. I wanted the character to feel proud, old and wise. My intention for this character is to be the wise old mentor, the guide, the spirit, Yoda, the character to tell the player what he’s actually supposed to do. I wanted to do a ghostly appearance to him but felt that a statuesque feel to him would be great. Imagine, a ghostly figure within a statue of a great being from time before. A nice idea I think. Then there’s also an idea where he could be a night light in the “real world” for the child. Perhaps I could combine it. “Psst, hey… kid! Take out your sword…” and then insert some hesitation, the sword comes out… BANG into imagination land and here’s the proud ghostly statue head giving him advice. Yeah… I like that.