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I picked Indonesia as my country, and more specifically Bali what has a very different culture (strong Hindu influence). My character will be the Monkey King, a character from the epic Ramayana Legend.
Here are some of my main references.Those are real statues from a Balinese Temple. I will use the statue as inspiration for my character.
I started sculpting the face. It has been challenging because I want to make an "humanoid" monkey man, so mostly keeping the human anatomy but with monkey features. I don't want my character to look like I attached a monkey head to a human body. I have been smoothing some of the strong features of the monkey and mixing it with the human anatomy. Here are the results so far...
Monkey Head Reference
My Head sculpt
In this update I fixed a little bit the proportions, specially the distance between eyes because although monkeys have smaller eyes and they look closer to the nose, I'm trying to mix between human and monkey features. My main monkey reference is the Macaque, typical monkey in Bali, not the chimpanzee which has more similar features to humans.Then I started to add more details to the face and body such as wrinkles and skin details. Those details are helping to sell better the concept, I think once I start to add hair that will help even more...
Hand DetailsFor the hands, I decided to look at gorilla hands as reference. Macaques have very small hands and don't fit so much with the style I'm looking for.
Following the idea of blending human and monkey features I enlarged hands and feet but keeping the human anatomy.Then I started the re-topology. High poly had 5,510,762 faces (triangles), low poly has 5,690 faces (quads).
And I unwrap my model for the UV, this is just the body. I plan to split my model in 4 materials, body and mouth/teeth/tongue, eyes, hair and finally clothing and accessories. I made the face much bigger because I want to make some close up renders of his face, and I want to have a higher resolution. By the other hand I laid up all my islands following the same direction to avoid issues later when texturing.
I baked my maps in Marmoset 3 (The new version 4 is very unstable on Mac and unfortunately I can't work with it). So far it looks like maps are good
I have been working on the mouth and teeth. I'm planning for the final render a pose where the character will be showing a very aggressive attitude with the mouth open. Here are some references. Again I'm trying to blend monkey and human features.
References
My high poly sculpt
My low poly model
Today I have been working on the clothing in Marvelous Designer.I made a Sarong as you can see, next step will be retopology and modeling some armor for the upper body.
Today I started blocking out the armor, accessories and adding some detail...I still need to work on the helmet and weapons...
In this update I have been polishing the armor pads, added more detail and worked on the helmet and details.
Hi everyone! This week has been very slow process, I have been retopologyzing and baking my maps. It's still a work in progress, I would like to optimize much more my models to lower the poly count, especially the helmet that is still crazy high. This is how it looks so far...
Hi! Today I have been working on optimizing the Helmet mesh. The High Poly was around 5,300,000, Mid poly at 78,000 and the final Low Poly at 27,000. Still very high for an accessory, but I don't think I can't get it lower without losing too much detail.
Today I finally finished my low poly. I separated all my meshes by materials and I'm ready for texturing. I won't spend a lot of time in the body because it will be mostly covered by fur.
First render of my low poly with maps in Substance Painter.
Today I started to play with hair, I'm making my hair with "hair cards" ... This is very early in the process but I think it's a good start.
I fixed details in the hair and fur in the head and added the rest to the body. I feel there are some areas that need some work, especially some transitions from hairy to bald... Those are hard cards not hair particles.
Hi everyone! Today I have been working on the pose, I'm not a rigger nor animator, so this is very challenging for me... So far I think this is the pose (or very similar) I'm going for... Next it's going to be texturing in A-Pose, polish the pose and add some facial expression, and then create some cool weapons for this guy... still lots to do...
Here are some renders from my test texturing the skin...I used Substance Painter for the texturing and Marmoset for the render.
Today I have been working on my hair textures, after starting over again a couple of times I think those hair cards are starting to look good even for close-up renders.
