I am still trucking along with creating my character. I expect he will be completed and rigged by tomorrow. Then, I will have to stop for this week. I can't wait to get back to working with Mo-Cap animations and Unity IK. I am eager to see how my character's rig works in Motion Builder when it is completed, but first things first.

Every time I create a character, I get more efficient at it, and my process becomes less haphazard. This character is a more difficult one to complete, as he is a super-soldier character with complicated organic armor plating, and this is one of my less intricate designs.

I am going to create a new 3D character creation workflow for myself, one that is suitable for a generalist. One that doesn't rely too heavily on hard surface modeling or sculpting, but utilizes both appropriately. The stages progress as so: blockout model, "sketch" sculpting, high-poly re-topology, detail sculpt, and low-poly re-topology. I will elaborate more on these in a later post.

I am proposing this type of workflow because as someone who is not a master sculptor, I have been bogged down trying to get evenly smooth surfaces in my character's armor. Many of my super-soldier's armor surfaces were very bumpy and wobbly, and I realized that this happened because there wasn't a clear separation between blockout sculpting and detail sculpting. I could tell that it would take hours, or even days to merely smooth out the sculpted armor surfaces, and even then they would not be perfect. Of course, the blockout model and high poly re-topology are not always necessary, but can be helpful steps.

So, I did a high-poly re-topology to effectively get rid of all bumpy surfaces, but I still will need to retopologize a 2nd time to bake the detail to a normal map.