In this project, I modeled and did motion capture for a character that I designed. My final goal for this project was to create a short video of my character moving using motion capture and render it all in two weeks.
During the first day I designed my character, which I decided would be a Skinwalker.
Skinwalkers are evil witches from Navajo culture that have the ability to turn into animals by wearing their skins. If you want to learn more about them click here.
While Skinwalkers tend to take the form of predators such as coyotes and cougars, they can take the form of any animal. So, I decided to have my character take the form of a deer. In my character concept that I made using Photoshop, I decided that I wanted to have his transformation go wrong so that he is in an state in-between looking like a human and a deer, with his body looking disproportional and deformed.
His body is human, but his head is completely transformed into a deer's with large jagged antlers, his arms are unnaturally long with long sharp nails, and he has hooves instead of feet. I also decided to make him a bit overweight to give the silhouette of his body a more unique shape.
To make the model for my Skinwalker, I modeled him in clay.
I started with a wooden base and created a wire skeleton to work off of. I attached the wire skeleton to the wooden base using an epoxy adhesive. Then, I added aluminum foil to the wire skeleton to create the basic shape of the model to make it less heavy. After adding the aluminum foil, I used a nondrying clay to model the character.
To clean the clay off of the wooden base and clay tools I used mineral sprits.
After finishing the model I used photogrammetry to get him onto the computer. I took a total of about four hundred photos of the model from different sides and angles, then used RealityCapture to create a 3D model of my character.
After creating the 3D model on the computer, I imported it to ZBrush and cleaned up the model. Most of the model came in fine, but the hands looked like they were melting. I had to separate all of the fingers and nails on both hands. After I finished cleaning the model I created a decimated version of it that could be imported into Maya.
I also exported some UV maps from the cleaned version of the model using XNormal, so that I could preserve all of the detail in the model and add it to the decimated version. UV maps are flattened versions of 3D models used to add detail to a model without adding extra geometry. This included a map for ambient occlusion or ao (top left), normal (top right), and cavity (bottom left).
Maps like these can be exported from ZBrush, except for the cavity map, which is why I decided to use ZNormals. The cavity map let me preserve more detail in the model that would have not been picked up by the other two maps.