The Gunslinger
** Work in progress **
2022. ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Unity
Made for real-time. 38,075 polygons
The Gunslinger wields a powerful space-magic revolver, which hovers in disassembled parts behind his hood. When he wants to use it he raises his right arm and the parts swirl around him before assembling in his hand. It is his only weapon, but it’s all he needs.
This character was cooking on my mental backburner for a long time. Inspired by many of my favorite characters in games and film, the design combines organic hard surface armor with precise mechanical anatomy, continuing my quest to improve at the kind of 3D modelling I’d like to do professionally.
Concept: Evan McClure
my ongoing conquest of hard surface modeling
To make this character I did a lot of research on hard surface workflows in ZBrush, including polishing by PolyGroups and ZModeler. I really enjoyed thinking through the mechanical anatomy of the arms and legs— from identifying which human muscle I was trying to mimic to testing the extremes of motion, then adjusting the design to make sure the parts almost never clip into each other. My mantra was ‘designing it to look legit, like it actually works.’ All in all I spent a little over a month on the high poly sculpt.
I advanced my skills in the retopology and unwrapping phase as well, taking an earnest shot at making a mesh designed for real-time. This meant carefully distinguishing between details that had to be modeled vs those that could be baked as normal maps, minimizing polycount, and trying to use as few UV tiles as possible while maintaining sufficient texel density.
Translating the high poly model to the low poly version by baking mesh maps in Substance Painter also proved to be more difficult than anything I had done before. I learned new features to accommodate the complexity of the character, including baking by mesh name (since the character is constructed out of just under 100 pieces) and using cages for some of the most complex parts of the mesh. Some of the maps still would not bake correctly despite my best efforts (parts of the gun kept getting left out), so I’ve left out the gun for now until I can get it done right.
I’ve identified a few areas where I’d still like to improve this further, which is why I’ve marked it as ‘work in progress.’ Once I finished baking the maps and started texturing, I quickly realized some parts of the mesh did not have enough space on the UV map, making the texture size (4K) not optimal compared to the result. Because of that, and because of hitting burnout city working two part-time jobs on top of this, I created a texture that gets the idea across for now. I plan to go back and redo the UV layout and mesh baking before I spend a substantial amount of time on the final texture, which I’ll do after my other work wraps up and I’ve taken a sufficient break. I’m really excited about how much I’ve learned while making this and look forward to building on it.
ZBrush
Final sculpts of the gun, the full character, and in-progress pose tests of the mechanical limbs.
Techniques: ZModeler, Live Boolean, Deformers, ArrayMesh, Polish by Polygroups
Concept sketches, drawovers, and inspo
Mimicking a workflow we often used at the UW animation program, I jumped back and forth between drawing and modeling when figuring out the exact design.