Building Ava

Ok so for my Digipen Senior project, I'm working with 5 programmers and 4 other artist to produce a 3rd person shooter. It's going to be a mix between Metroid Prime, Silent Hill, and Mega Man. Sort of sci-fi exploration meets Mega-man power ups, with a bit of a creepy vibe. I'm the Character Artist for the project, so I'm in charge of the 3d character models and textures, which I hope to start documenting on this blog.


So I've been working on the main character Ava for about 4 weeks now. I started box modeling, using our concept artist's sketch as a template. My budget was 5000 polys and I landed a little under that. The detail was used to carefully shape the edgeflow around the armpits and shoulders, something I wanted to improve from the last model I did. I wasn't worried about suit detail at this stage because most of that would be covered in a normal map via sculpting in Mudbox (as seen below).


I decided to use Mudbox because the computers at school have them, and Zbrush is a little trickier when it comes to baking normal maps. Right now I've got a basic diffuse map to help visualize the key areas of the model, and I've began sculpting her suit on a new layer, that way I'm able to alter anatomy and suit detail independent of one another.