Here is a video turn around of the low poly 3D outfit that I’ve been working on. It is still untextured; the colors are simply temporary placeholders to give an idea of the final color scheme. There are also no normal maps applied to the mesh to indicate high poly details. Those improvements will be added soon.
I finished the low poly skirt:
It looks like it’s sitting a little funny up near the hips, but that’s just because the thigh armor is pushing it forward up front so that it doesn’t hug her figure quite as well as I would have liked. I can’t very well have the thigh armor mesh poking through the skirt fabric mesh though, so it is what it is - clothing doesn’t always sit pretty in real life either.
After basically putting this project on hold for months to focus on other projects still under NDA, I’m making time for my portfolio again. I created a high poly tube top and a skirt/pant combo in Marvelous Designer, but after working with the skirt/pant clothing pieces in Maya for a little while I decided I wasn’t happy with the clothing design and remade the skirt/pant combo into a skirt/skirt combo.
High poly Marvelous Designer clothing viewed in Maya.
Now I’m working on the low poly clothing. When I create low poly clothing for characters I nearly always use the character body as a starting point, duplicating the mesh and trimming or otherwise altering it to fit the area covered by the piece of clothing. This ensures that as the body and the clothing deform, the topology stretches and compresses in the same areas to prevent clipping as much as possible. The exception to this rule is loose articles of clothing such as capes or skirts.
Armor is usually a different matter. It doesn’t need to match up because it deforms much less, if at all. I usually build a low poly base for armor in Maya, then send it to ZBrush to sculpt the high poly. I have created the low poly armor for the character already, but have yet to do the high poly sculpting.
Here is what my low poly outfit looks like at the moment. (The skirts are not pictured because the low polys are not finished after the re-design.):
After about a week of working intermittently on the high poly sculpt I’m still finishing up some fine details, but the shape of the low poly is finalized. I rendered a quick wireframe turn-around in Blender. Here is the result.
And here is some progress on the high poly model:
After 4 years of working 2 jobs and never having time to add to my portfolio, I’m finally down to only one job, so I’m using my time off to update my portfolio. Here’s my latest work in progress:
Low Poly Base Model created in Maya
Close up of the face of the Low Poly Base Model created in Maya
Early progress on the High Poly Sculpt in ZBrush. The character’s mouth, particularly, needs more work, but it’s a start.
