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:

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.

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.

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!