Armin game character finalized

As promised in the lat­est post of this series , here is the final model of our game char­ac­ter called Armin, a myth­i­cal Per­sian war­rior who clob­bers his ene­mies with his two gigan­tic maces.

This char­ac­ter was mod­eled and shaded by Reza Ramezani using 3DMax 2009 and ZBrush 3.1based on con­cepts by Faraz Shan­yar.

Armin war­rior char­ac­ter concept

Armin final closeup

Armin final model

The model was tex­tured in Pho­to­shop and ren­dered using Vray and the whole process took approx­i­mately eight work­ing days (we weren’t work­ing on it full time). Most of the process was pretty straight­for­ward except a few prob­lems we had with Vray’s sub-surface scat­ter­ing mate­r­ial. We were try­ing to obtain a rather real­is­tic but at the same time styl­ized look for the skin of the char­ac­ter but we kept bump­ing into lim­i­ta­tions on this shader.

Armin war­rior ZBrush model

We had never done sub-surface shad­ing in Vray before and we didn’t have any detailed doc­u­men­ta­tion on the work­ings of the sss shader so we tried all the para­me­ters and finally decided to use a blend mate­r­ial with the sss shader in one slot and a vray mate­r­ial with the paint map in the other. It worked pretty well and we reached 80% of the result we were try­ing to achieve and decided to add the rest in post. To do this we ren­dered another layer of skin using Men­tal Ray’s Fast Skin shader which gave a very good result and we added this to our char­ac­ter in our Fusion comp.

Here you can see some of the tex­ture maps we used for this model:

Some of Armin’s textures

And the light­ing of the scene which con­sisted of two spot lights, one act­ing as a key light and the other act­ing as a rim light. The rest was envi­ron­ment light­ing and envi­ron­ment maps.

Armin scene light­ing setup

Here you have a screen­shot of our ren­der set­tings but we didn’t really fine-tune these since the ren­der was pretty fast and we were get­ting a decent result:

Armin’s Vray ren­der settings

These are some of the ren­der passes we used to com­pos­ite this image. We hope we’ll have the time to rig and ani­mate this char­ac­ter pretty soon and we will give you an update on that as soon as it’s available.

Armin ren­der passes

Game characters concept design

We cre­ated con­cept designs for a few game char­ac­ters a while ago and we never got around to build­ing their 3D mod­els. These were really great char­ac­ters designed by Faraz Shan­yar who had also designed some of our con­cepts for our theme park projects. We finally were able to pick up these con­cepts and cre­ate them in 3D and in the next few posts will present you with some work in progress images as well as the final cg characters.

These are 4 char­ac­ters which are inspired by Iran­ian folk­lore and mythol­ogy. They are a group of war­riors who have been com­rades for a very long time, fight­ing side by side and have been deformed by fatigue, the hor­rors and atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in war and their bat­tle wounds. Nev­er­the­less they stick together through thick and thin since they have learned how to fight and win together.

Armin

Kam

Ghob

These char­ac­ters were cre­ated for our com­pany demo and will not be fea­tured in any future game for the moment. Hope you enjoy them and we will pub­lish new blog posts in the future on their making.