Making Of 'Motorball Gally'

Introduction

Hi there, my name is Tommy Wong, and I am a character artist in Malaysia. This will be a brief introduction to the process I've gone through for creating my Comicon Challenge 2010 entry. Comicon Challenge is the little sister/brother of the more famous character competition Dominance War. I've missed the two previous years but in 2010, I decided to join for good.

Like many artists, I grew up reading lots of comics and manga and playing lots of games, but I had a slight twist. I can't read Chinese and most of the books I own were imported into Malaysia in Chinese. I still love all of them anyway, but Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita) is the story that burns deeply into my memory with its exciting visual story. So long before I started this image, I knew that at some point I was gonna bring Gally (Alita) to life in my Maya viewport.

First Step

This year's Comicon Challenge was to take your favorite action comic character and either make them older, in their veteran years, or make them younger, like a kid or teenage version of the same character. I decided to try to make Gally older, or rather more mature.

I always start my projects by gathering as much information as possible. For Gally, I wanted to know her more, so I spent time re-reading the manga to get to know her better. Once I got to know the character well enough, I started gathering images of Gally.

I started by searching the internet for artwork of Gally done by other artists. I find this step very intriguing as I get to see how other artists interpreted the same character. From there, I listed down  Gally's personality and key features, and then I started hunting for more specific images to aid in creating her, like what kind of armor is she wearing, how will it look, what is the material made of etc. From this image hunt, I compiled a material analysis sheet. This was the main piece of information I kept referring back to (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Second Step

I began my modeling by quickly building a base mesh in Maya, with very minimal detail. My concern was the proportion of the character (Fig.02). Once I got a base mesh blocked out, I quickly imported it into ZBrush and started a concept sculpt. Here I focused on the face a lot, as I wanted to get her to look more mature and aged (Fig.03). I kept returning to my references as I wanted her to look more Asian as her original name Yoko suggests. For her body, I doodled some ideas and wasn't particular stressed about it as I knew I would rebuild almost the entire body from the neck down later (Fig.04).

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Once I was satisfied with the face, I used ZBrush's Decimation Master and brought the reduced model into Blender, where I quickly went about reconstructing the face with better topology (Fig.05). I find Blender's poly modeling very efficient for this task. Once the ideal topology was done, I brought it back to ZBrush to transfer the sculpt details from the original head and also to refine the sculpt a little (Fig.06).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

The next task was to build the body. For this, I brought the model into Maya and, using box modeling, I slowly built it part by part. I constantly paid attention to the model's silhouette and kept refining the contours of the body (Fig.07). To get the details, I used Maya's Crease tool (Fig.08) for hard edges and lots of floating geometries (Fig.09), a trick I picked up from Dominance War IV's winning entry.

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

I also created a few shaders to help create a color theme as well as separate the parts according to color. This is a surprisingly useful technique since I was later able to bake out (painfully) a base color map from this. The different shaders also served to remind me which part was metal, which rubber, which had more shine or was duller etc. Here is the final high poly model (Fig.10).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Third Step

I proceeded to build the low poly model. For this task, I just duplicated the high poly model and removed all creases. I ended up with a pretty good starting base, except for the body which I had to rebuild from scratch to get a closer fit. Then, using Maya's Transfer Map tool, I slowly baked out the Normal map and Color map. The color map was derived from the numerous shaders I had applied in the modeling process. This process took the longest of all as I kept running into problems I had neglected back in modeling. It pays to go through a model to check that all the normals are facing the correct side and not inverted. This is the baked result with diffuse and normal map rendered in Marmoset (Fig.11).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Then from here it was texturing time. Using the baked color map as base, I started layering all the dirt, scratches and battle damage. One thing I find rather useful is to overlay a layer of "rainbow" colors on top of your diffuse because it helps to create subtle hue changes. I set it to a very low value, about 1-2 percent at most (Fig.12). Once the diffuse was done, I then created a complementing specular map from the diffuse. This part of the process will be very brief if the layers in the diffuse are done with a bit of planning (Fig.13).  A few Hue/Saturation layers, and inverting of those scratch layers will usually yield a pretty good starting Specular map.

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Looking back at the high poly model, the critique I got was that the legs were very bare of details, and the sculpt lacked secondary details. I proceed to draw panel lines (Fig.14) and using a wonderful Photoshop plugin called NDO, I converted those to normal maps and overlay them onto my original normal map. Some might compare it to Crazybump and most would prefer Crazybump, but I find being able to draw and create normal maps without leaving Photoshop a great time saver!

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

This is the final diffuse map (Fig.15) and specular map (Fig.16) and normal map (Fig.17).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Final Step

Once the texture is done, I did a few poses, constantly making minor adjustments and taking care with the silhouette and line of action. Once I hit the pose I wanted, I exported the files into Marmoset Toolbag to do the final render (Fig.18). The post process feature is truly a great help as I was able to easily change color and mood, readjust lighting and play around with the setting without having to bringing it over to Photoshop (yet). As you can see the result was pretty much there (Fig.19). The renders were then stitched in Photoshop with minor touchup on the background piece. Here's a higher resolution of the final art piece. (Fig.20).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Fig.20

Post-Mortem

Looking back on the project, I noticed a lot of mistakes that I had made. One of the mistakes was halfway texturing; I realized the face UV was way too small for me to paint additional details, or to bake a nicer looking normal map. The hair as well proved to be a tough piece as I had to find a quick workaround to make it look decent, though thankfully I had some guidance. I definitely would love to redo the face and hair one day.

Before I end this article, I would love to take this opportunity to thank all the fellow Gameartisans and Comicon contestants. Big thanks especially to Mashru Mishru, Kyalie, Mask_Salesman, mr_ace, resident22, Arkhange, jocz and FredH. It's been a fun and enlightening competition. I hope whatever I wrote is not too much nonsense, and that you could pick up some tricks. Thank you!

Here's the Photoshop plugin NDO I mentioned earlier, as well the Marmoset Toolbag for those interested. I highly recommend giving it a spin.

http://www.cgted.com/
http://www.8monkeylabs.com/tech/toolbag/

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