Introduction

Greetings to All!  This project all started when I became interested in several works by artists that participated in the well-known contest, Dominance War III.  In short, the idea of this contest helped me to come up with a concept: to think up a story and to create a character with an original artefact and weapon.

Because I was too late to participate in the contest myself, I decided to create something similar but slightly deviating from the very strict rules that the participants were working to.  So for the purposes of self-education I decided to develop an unusual, interesting, whilst at the same time laughable, character with even more unusual weapon of choice!

The main tools that I used in this project were 3ds Max 9, UV Layout 2, ZBrush 3.1, and Photoshop CS2.

Concept

The idea came almost immediately to me after my tomcat got plastered in valerian tincture and began to fight with a toy-mouse.  I decided to restore justice, and so the concept of the "old and wise mouse-veteran" was born!

Sketches

I then began to develop a visual appearance of the veteran, taking into consideration his "real life" and what he could use to defend himself in the eternal and unequal struggle between himself and his enemy: cats.  I invented a few details, such as the weapon (an old pipette with a bayonet needle), a shield (the lid of a bottle), bow and arrows (matches) and so on (Fig01).

Modelling

As a base I took an old model of a little mouse which I created for a television spot for the New Year (Fig02a).  I mainly used spline modelling for the low-poly model, and as a result of several adjustments I obtained this low-poly (2,500 polygons) model of my veteran (Fig02b).

Unwrapping UVs

Since I had never worked with unwrapping UVs in earnest before, I started reading through different forums and got myself familiar with different opinions, and as a result I stopped at, in my opinion, a very useful programme called "UV Layout”. After studying several tutorials on this, I approximately understood the principle and therefore unwrapped my model.  Here is what I got (Fig03).


I have no practical experience with complicated unfolding, which is why I perhaps made wrong seams in some places, but this had no special significance because I had proposed to texture with ZBrush anyway.  But I have to note that, in this case, it should closely follow the absence of polygon overlapping, otherwise the texture may not work well enough.

Working out the Details

I imported my low-poly model into ZBrush and proceeded to detail it.  I gradually increased the level of subdivision, trying to work out the details as much as possible, right down to smallest wrinkles and pores. 
In total there were about 8 million polygons and 7 subdivision levels, which I thought was quite enough (Fig04a – b).