Yusuke, the Bandit - Realtime Character
Hi everyone! Here is my submission for this year's Rookie Awards, which also happens to be my final degree project for the Game Artist education at Futuregames. For this project, I wanted to create a real-time game character inspired by feudal Japan, but with a fantasy twist to it; and while I didn't follow a specific concept for this project, I was primarily inspired by the character work done in the game Ghost of Tsushima by Sucker Punch. From a technical perspective, I wanted to delve into techniques that I hadn't had much of a chance to explore before, such as clothing creation in Marvelous Designer, the hair card workflow, and rendering in Unreal Engine, as well as generally improving my sculpting workflow. Thank you for checking it out!
While I didn't go off any specific concept for this character, I knew I wanted to create a bit of a rugged, bandit-type of character, with a bit of a rōnin-esque look to him.
The scar over Yusuke's eye was a decision made later on; primarily to further push the rugged look and to add some visual interest to the face, as well.
For the design of the clothing, I went for a mix of more rough, tattered materials combined with some more ornate items like the prayer scrolls, to convey the idea that he's "borrowed" some of his outfit from unfortunate passers-by.
For the clothes, most of the work was done in Marvelous Designer to ensure correct folds, especially since his clothing is quite flowy. I exported the cloth meshes to ZBrush, and after remeshing the clothing, did some clean-up and added smaller details.
I used ZWrap to project the tertiary details of the skin from a photoscanned head model, in order to save time but also because I was curious about the plug-in!
The material set-up for the skin texture in Unreal Engine; for this, I primarily relied on J Hill's material workflow, which allowed for much more control in determining the final look of the skin.
While I used Unreal Engine's groom system for the facial hair, I used a hair card workflow for the main hairstyle as I had already done this beforehand and was quite satisfied with the overall look; the hair sits at 24.680 tris at LOD0.
After I'd become slightly more comfortable using Unreal Engine's Movie Render Queue, I decided to film a quick flythrough to better show some of the details on Yusuke's body!