Character Base Meshes

Character Base Meshes

To save time for later on and to help the group workload, we split into groups of people who will work on base meshes, people who would concept characters and people who would do an art test in Unreal to see how a finished, textured asset would look in engine.

I opted in for the character base mesh group, so I have started working on a medium male model to use as a base mesh for the team. 

There were 3 noticeable groups of body types in the chosen character list; large (muscular/overweight), medium (skinny/shorter) and small (youngest).

Here are some screenshots of initial ZBrush base sculpts which I have been refining. I plan on eventually retopolgising the mesh into a low poly equivalent, with polygroups for each main body part, which will help later on when using the base mesh for character sculpting. I got the idea of this from Boa Vu's tutorial on artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xogKW

Judging by most male characters and reference, the normal/idealistic number of heads that make up the height of a character is 7.5/8 heads tall so I measured my model against how many heads tall he was and he came in at about 8.

After inspecting my sculpt so far, I thought that the proportions looked a bit stretched so I decided to rearrange them so that they looked slightly more natural. 

As this model is going to be used as a base mesh, I feel it's important to give it average proportions so that it's roughly a mid way starting point for future character sculpts.  

I decided on making the model roughly 7/7.5 heads tall as I felt the proportions looked better this way.