Vyder | Tak'Oba

I made this realtime character for the project Vyder based on conceptarts by Romain d'Escrienne : https://www.artstation.com/makkhariel
I was asked to join them last year but only did a few months ago, I really dig in their conceptarts, I like Romain's colorful palette and creative mind. It's not another human-centered universe, it's a curious kind of sci-fi that has a positive look, I don't know how to explain it better with my own words, but it speaks to me. Also, they came to me saying they loved the work I did with SWR and wanted me to keep doing this style for their project.

Since this character was non-human, I drafted him with muscles shapes (simple deformed primitives + Dynamic Subdivs). It was particularly helpful since the muscles sometimes detach from the body, creating curious caveats that had to be convincing. Once I was okay with this first pass of muscles, I unified them under a single mesh and added some brush strokes, mostly using the HPolish, to mimic a kind of a thin skin layer and blend better areas where muscles and bones connects together, as the anatomy is more of those two components ;)
The sword hilt + Scabbard were a bit complex to get right since I only had a silhouette of these, so I had to figure out what would be the 3D version, it was challenging, but really interesting to explore =)
Then I did the retopo on ZBrush & 3dsmax, depending on if I were using SubD modeling or not, as it's easier to just reverse to a lowpoly version and add a few chamfers than retopo everything from 0. I did UVS on 3dsMax, nothing to add up here, it's just UVs haha.
Then textures with my good old friend 3DCoat as usual, I bake my maps on Marmoset Toolbag and I like to use the IDMap to push values on the base of my texture process in 3DCoat, it often helps making subtle details and break the "3D" feeling by having more accidental differences within texture base color.
For the rigging/skinning/animation, I used another good old friend you know well if you've been following me for a long time : akeytsu. The had part was on the face since there were plenty of horns planted on not always hard parts of the head, and the character of Tak'Oba also shows really race-specific features so alike in sculpt mode, I had to find a way to rig this. The idea is the same as for a human head globally : decompose its parts in "who-follows-who" parts, and skin them accordingly. Of course a few animation tests are always welcome to make sure your rig has neat controls, and refine if it's not up to your likings. That's what I love with akeytsu you know, the fact that I, as an animator, can adjust the rig to suit my needs (or as a rigger being able to animate effortlessly and ensure I know why I'm doing certain choices).

That's all for this one, I hope you'll like it !