A new project?
I probably should have started this blog a while ago...
But here it is.
At this current stage I am beginning the animation of my 'robotic golem' character.
So I'm going to try and walk you through the steps to where I am now and then in future posts I hope that I can talk more about my experience rigging and animating my little character.
SOOOOO
Where to start?
Well this character didn't just come from nothing. I'm actually writing a book and it's based off of one of my characters within the book itself. The description of the character is:
"Its head was a least 8ft from the ground making it about 12ft tall with the giant boulder on its back causing its hunch"
So I thought why not take my art skills and put them to good use in creating one of my own favourite characters. However, I never really had any spare time to do this or any place to start. After completing my final year at University, studying games art, I was offered a freelance job on a small indie game. Whilst working on the game I produced foliage assets for various places of the world. However, these foliage assets were 'low poly' to the extreme. If you've ever seen any of my work before you'd understand it is something I absolutely adore and I could just model low poly things for the rest of my life. So, Whilst modelling I created some bushes that were clumped together and, to me, started looking like a hand. That is where it began. A few months later and I modelled my golem character in 20 minutes or so just using Uv spheres in blender and playing around with the placement.
I then used a Blender add on that I personally find incredible - called Cablerator.
It allows you to create a cable between two objects and I'd recommend it if you are looking to do some cable modelling with speed and ease:
https://blendermarket.com/products/cbl
After this I made sure to unwrap all of my golem....... NOT. I decided because this is just a side project for me and is more about the final render than the actual efficiency of the character, in terms of Uv space and material usage, that I would just stick to having various materials.
As you can see below there is a fully rendered shot of my initial Golem pose, which I think looks great and really shows off the character. However, I knew more could be done. So lets go through the materials.
As you can see we have:
Bronze
Silver
Rock colours
Moss (Originally green)
Lights
And to break these down would be a waste of time because realistically why would you care that much about what brown and grey I used? - haha
Here's the tutorial I used for getting the metallic textures right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCqmIL2GZ7c
And then the one I used for the procedural moss texture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs38-WOvdXM
Now here is where it gets interesting. I played around with the moss texture because I wanted to give it a more stylised feel rather than hyper realistic.
Realistic:
My version:
HOB:
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