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).
(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).
(Fig02a)
(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).
(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.
3DTotal
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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).
