The Mortal Engines Character

It seems a bit late to be doing a blog on this, it was due in last week but better late than never.

Our latest 3D project has been the Mortal Engines Self portrait. The trash and building projects that I've done so far this year haven't been very complicated, not compared to doing a self portrait anyway. The closest thing we've done was the 3D gladiator in the first year and mine wasn't very good. So I was a bit worried my mortal engines one wouldn't be great either.

The project was incorporated with 2D, so we had 4 weeks to produce visual concepts and design work, make a 3D model with 9000 tris, texture and rig it, and then make another lower tri version and texture and rig that, I think, I cant even remember.

It was really daunting to start off, it felt like a lot of work and not that much time to do it in, the 9000 tri character alone is the highest budget and most complicated piece of 3D we've had to do so far.

I got into the 2D pretty quickly, the steam punk theme is something I'm already quite familiar with so it was interesting and enjoyable to design a character of myself in that style. I started off with some quick concept ideas.

I decided on the 4th concept idea pretty quickly and started modelling.
Rather than model the full character straight away I actually made the basic mesh of my body first, without clothes so I could build up from it. I used the same method as my gladiator and started from the chest and worked outwards. I struggled a bit afterwards, figuring out how I'd model the clothes on top, I wanted to have a cloth modifier on my coat bottom but after a lot of trail and error just decided to leave it (the cloth modifier kept making my coat disappear??).

After modelling the clothes I wasted a massive amount of time with Zbrush. I thought it would be a good idea to try use it for this project to enhance my model, but I hadn't learnt anything about Zbrush before now. So  I wasted almost 2 weeks trying to figure out how to use it, just to end up not bothering anyway.



In the end I didn't manage to get my project finished on time, I think this is mainly down to how much time I wasted with Zbrush. I managed to get the main model finished with textures (apart from spec), I didn't get it rigged and I didn't get any of the low tri version done either, or the design doc.

I'm reasonably pleased with the model I got done but think it could of been much better if I hadn't been rushing to get things done on time. I'm planning to have all the bits missing done as soon as possible, even though Im not sure if there is another chance to hand in.

I'll post up some screens of my finished 3D models, when its finished I guess. For the time being here is my 2D final for the Mortal Engines Project.