Tragic Kingdom: Issun…kinda

Picture it….

Sitting, huddled in a blanket, surrounded by nachos, fingers about to dance across the keyboard as if composing a rousing concerto as I rig like a mad man!

….then a hurricane comes, creates a storm, launches a lightning bolt down at my little ol’ cottage atop a big tall mountain and BEWM goes my computer’s motherboard and power supply. And my life for the next 5 days. Sad as that is.

Silver lining is I got a newer, better computer out of it, but it’s set me back a bit progress-wise. Ah well. I’ve decided to post what I did today anyway, between the other stuff, as some have expressed an interest in the rigging portion of it all. From here on in, I will likely be taking a break from Issun and TK in general, as I’ve been asked to be part of a small animation project and will be dedicating myself to that entirely, and using whatever spare time I have to (finally) build that website I keep talking about.

 

Orienting the joints before parenting

Testing the IK handles for the leg animations.

I did warn it wasn’t much 😛 Busy busy busy. On another note, this rig when it’s finished will of course be a bit more in-depth than the first one, which was basically made for a specific pose, one not very demanding at that. I decided to start from scratch, because rigs tend to be fickle things when working backward. That and they’re fun to build ❤

On another note, I just realized I never posted a screenshot of the very low-poly model after the textures and normal mapping were applied:

Low-poly Back

 

Tragic Kingdom: Issun-Boshi 4 – Texture

This is part of the sculpt update, time just got the best of me yesterday. At this point, the base texturing is complete, though I’m still going back and forth on the possibility of camera close-ups on the face. It may be that heads get their own maps, haven’t completely decided yet. For now, I’m really happy with how these came out:

Torso

Head

Head Front

Back/Shoulder

Legs

Legs and Cloth

Legs/cloth back

Full 3q

I’m working on a custom design for a tattoo sleeve now for the right arm and chest. That will eventually be part of the design, but I’ve never done one before so it might be a while before I settle on something I find pleasing. In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on rigging and animating most likely, and will also be getting started on a female base mesh which will then be incorporated into the designs of more characters to come.

The texturing took ~many~ hours of blending high-res photos of actual people with painting and compositing techniques for something realistic and attractive. I must admit though, while I’m happy with the results, I texture sort of begrudgingly; to me, models always look their best in gray.

Hey there’s a thought…a complete black & white aesthetic :O

Tragic Kingdom: Issun-Boshi 3 – Sculpt

Big ol’ update! The sculpt took a lot of time and I didn’t get to add as much detail as I’d have liked. My computer, as it turns out, can’t handle going above level 5 in Mudbox, out of memory errors galore. Fortunately I have a newer, stronger computer coming in soon, but in the meantime I’m pretty happy with the detail I pulled out of this guy at a medium resolution.

Torso

Shoulder, torso and bis

Shoulder, back and tris

Legs, front

Legs, 3q

Back of legs

Front face

Side view

Ear, cheek and eye contouring

Face detailing

Front anat

Back anat

Full front

Back shot

Neck, shoulder

I toyed around with a few different ideas for musculature, but in the end I went for something more realistic and ‘attainable’ rather than comic book amounts of muscle and sinew. That’s never really been my preferred style….ironic since I still read and love comics.

Yes, I’m a geek.

Tragic Kingdom: Issun-Boshi 2 – Modeling

So, the modeling was actually very easy thanks to my prior work on a base male mesh “Kai”. I only had to reroute a handful of edgeloops to get the topology I wanted, and the face was largely pushing/pulling verts to get the desired facial features.

Complete

Base Mesh

Cheek fill

Eye contour

Torso reshape

Jaw and Nose restructure

Start of Hair

Finished hair + Wire

Beginning of Robe

Finished robe, side view

Finished Robe, back 3Q

Finished Robe, 3Q

Finished, Back

Finished, Front + Wire

I’m rather happy with how he came out. I’m also waaaay under my poly budget, set at 20,000tris and only coming in at 10k. This is meant to be a one-on-one fighting game, so I have a lot of elbow room with polys, even more considering how under budget I came in for this particular Issun costume (I’m planning several for each character). From here, he’ll be UV Mapped and taken into Mudbox for sculpting and eventually normal mapping. I’ll post those results when they’re ready!