This page will show the development for the main character that the player will control.
Name: Jack Sullivan
Age: 33
Origin: Bodie,Ca,North America
Date of birth: 1865
Background Story
Back in the days of the wild west when there was all but small shanty towns and open waste lands, a faint and strange sound could be heard from deep within a small cave. The ground shook violently, and then all was silent once more as if something had come and gone in the matter of seconds. The silence was yet again broken with the screams and mad ranting of a man covered in dirt and sand emerging from the mouth of the cave. As the frantic mans eyes glared at the searing sun of the desert he shouted with dust filled lungs “the devil, the devil he has arrived too destroy us all…help…. the devil…”
As the man suddenly dropped to his knees and gazed into the wastelands he caught the glimpse of a small boy and girl hiding with curiosity and fear behind a small rock heap. The two children were brother and sister and had been playing on the out skirts of the small shanty town near the cave. They were playing “Giants and scorpions” with the local scorpions, who had all soon scattered with the recent event that had arisen.
As the two children hid, the man’s ears filled with the terrifying sound of a gun being fired and felt a sharp pain growing rapidly from his chest. Looking down at his blood stained shirt he looked over to the frightened boy “run lad…RUN!” The boy peering over the rock heap froze in fear and looked down too were his little sister was hiding. She was gone. The boy quickly gazed around in fear for the whereabouts of his sister. A second gunshot echoed as he witnessed his sister fall to the floor near the first mans body. She had gone to see if the man was ok unaware of the danger ahead. A second figure emerges from the cave. As the dark figure came into focus the boy still frozen in fear were he stood and hoping his sister had tripped over, he gazed upon a rough faced man holding a large over sized pistol. The dark figure looked over to the young girls body and replying “shame she was a cute ‘un too …oh well wrong place wrong time I guess” with no remorse in the tone of his voice and a slight snigger. The boy now knowing his sister had been murdered started to run at the dark figure in a fit of rage. “he said run kid” the man growled at the boy and pointing his strange weapon at the boy. The boy felt his arm jerk backwards and pulling his body into a twisting motion with the ringing sound in his ears.
The boy lay as the pain pulsed in his arm too yet again feel the ground rumble beneath him. Looking over again to his sisters body and then to his executioner the boys eyes opened wider as he saw something startling. The dark figure now stood in front of what looked like a floating large mirror but reflecting its surroundings backwards and moving like the surface of water. The dark figure gazed the anomaly and then back to the wounded boy rapidly bleeding from his arm “it’s your lucky day kid…this is where I get off” he said with sinister rotten toothed grin. Just as he had once appeared his was gone within this watery mirror, the ground still slightly shaking and within seconds suddenly stopped. The boy felt two arms grab him as he was lifted from the floor and a worried but friendly voice say “What the hell happened here boy…my god… what happened”
The boy still frozen with fear and gazing were the dark figure once stood looked up at the towns sheriff and replayed “the devil sir, the devil” .The sheriff looked at the maimed boy “Everything’s going to ok son…what’s your name boy” .The boy still with the images of the recent events haunting his vision replayed “Jack sir….Jack Sullivan”.
Concepts
After looking at a range of reference, costumes, old Wild West photos and many old cowboy movies I had some idea of what I wanted the main character to look like. Below is the start of the concept for jack and his overall look.
Once I was happy with the style and look, I started the blocking out progress ready for a high polygon mesh to be created from.
Blocking Out Jack..
My first approach was to get a basic male model that I had in from recent projects to save me time creating a new one from scratch and scale it to the earlier concept.
Once I was happy with the scale and proportion of the base model I couldn’t help myself and decided to make the cowboy hat first to get him looking the part from the very beginning…
After modelling the hat and taking a coffee brake one of the main parts of the model I knew would be the most challenging was getting the lower part of the long jacket to move naturally with the models legs as he walks/runs. Keeping this in mind I kept this section of the model basic as possibly.
Working towards the upper chest area I extruded the top vertex points from the lower jacket mesh and added swift loops for later editing.
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| (cowboy in a dress lol) Using the swift loop tool in 3Ds max I added and extruded the polygons to make his belt around the waist   Making the belt around his waist came in handy for his bullet/knife bandolier and was a case of copy and pasting the lower belt and adjusting to fit around his chest   |
Moving away from the long jacket and belts the next stage was to work out how to make his half shoulder poncho. Which took me to look at how ponchos are made because after many attempts I still couldn’t work out what which was the best way to produce one in 3D. Turns out sometimes over thinking a object can make things more complicated then they seem and I soon learnt ponchos where as simple as a square piece of cloth with a hole cut out in the middle…. To remind me of this I made a little funny reminder to look back on if I start over thinking how to make 3d objects
Taking the poncho design I decided to take it literary and make a 3d plane with the centre section removed. Next I applied the cloth tool to the plane and made the rest of the model into a collision so that the plane would act the same as real cloth would once it fell onto the model
After playing around with the cloth tool and its force cloth function I finally was satisfied with the end result
Decided to take a quick render of the model to see my progression
Focused more of the smaller details such as the shoulder pads and metal cuffs on the lower arms. Also whist making the arm cuffs did a little rescaling of the arm proportions and made them slightly smaller. The model is now ready to focus on the high polygon modelling which will be done in Autodesk Mudbox.
Jacks head…
Now the main character has a name and a bit of a background story I decided to but a face to the name. Started with looking over the reference sheets and went with the good old cowboy rough shaven look. My first approach was to get the head proportions to scale and used two planes with images projected on them to use as a guard line whilst modelling. Using a standard 4x4x4 cube in 3Ds max and adding a symmetry tool to speed up the modelling process I started moving the vertices to create a basic skull shaped mesh. This give me a good basic shape for the head to start adding swift loops and move on to create the nose, eyes and mouth.
Once the basic shape of the head was finished I exported the model as a FBX file and loaded the model into Autodesk Mudbox to start the sculpting stage. Using Mudbox I first give the model a neck and also made some scaling adjustments as head looked a little long from the side. Once I was happy with the overall shape I moved onto the fine details such as the shape of the ear and where the hairline would be. Also used some ear reference for the inside of the ear. (because ears are just weird once you look closely )
Focused on the eyes, nose and mouth making them more defined
After a couple of hours sculpting, Jack’s head is now ready to be transferred back to 3Ds Max to start the topology. This process is to rebuild the high polygon model and lowering the polygon count suitable for the use in game engines. This process is vital and can be very time consuming but once completed enables the high polygon models normal mapping coordinates to be projected onto the low polygon mesh.
Final screen shot showing the high polygon, low polygon and the low polygon mesh with its new normal map applied to it.
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| Projected normal map from the high polygon model The final stage was the texturing for the diffuse map which was created using photos of skin, facial hair, eyes and head hair and then using the projection tool in Mudbox.   |
Working on the chest…
Now that the head is finished I decided to work on the chest area and work my way down . I also made a quick speed capture video from me working on the chest and applying creases and other details such as his shirt underneath his long jacket.
As seen on the head with the topology technique I made another quick video to show this progress
Unwrapping…
Unwrapping is one of the most vital stages of any model and takes a lot of time and patience. This process allows the 3D models surfaces to be flattened into a 2D map to then apply textures and detail.
Since the deadline for the project is getting closer I decided to hold back on the high polygon sculpting and get the ready for testing within the game engine. The model was first attached together as a whole to allow the use of one full UV map for the entire model. This can be seen in many game models throughout the industry.
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