The next day, I talked to my personal tutor, and he advised me to go for a concept that suits the style of the game better. One thing he pointed out was that the SO characters lack in small accessories, while the maid I had previously chosen has too much detail concentrated around the waist. Their clothes are usually simple and colorful. As a result, I am now working on the top left concept, the girl with the guitar.
I went on working with the same base mesh I created for my first attempt and created her clothes in Marvelous. Unexpectedly, there were many issues with the pleated skirt. I had may attempts where I started from a regular pleated skirt, and then sew the pleats pointing outwards to reduce the volume on the upper part of the skirt (and to accentuate her waist and hips, just like in the concept). the problem was that the pleats going inwards were protruding through the mesh, causing simulation issues. I was able to fix this by making another pattern, where the inward pleats were more narrow than the other ones. Additionally, I simulated all the sewing at once. This is how the pattern looks like:
Afterwards, I imported everything into Zbrush and proceeded to clean up the messy topology from MD. There were a lot of hidden triangles inside all the meshes, but I used ZModeler again to get rid of them and to weld the seams that were not welded. When everything was nice and subdivided, I added some extra wrinkles and folds, where necessary. This time, I will try not to rely so much on Substance Painter to create my surface details, but have them sculpted and baked onto the mesh.
This is how my model looked in an early stage:
At that point I wasn't very pleased with the anatomy of the face. I felt like it was too generic, with no personality and it didn't fit my character at all. I realised this after trying several haircuts on her.
It took me quite a bit of time until I reached a fairly good result with the face. I didn't have any specific feature in mind, other than big, almond-shaped eyes. I imagine her as a friendly and playful type. However, conveying her personality merely through her features is especially hard since the original concept does it through her face's expression. For now I'm alright with the result, but I might as well modify it again after deciding on a hairstyle. Even if I already added some of the tertiary details on the skin, it will be easy because I managed to keep all the subdivision levels.
While creating the skin pores and wrinkles I watched Realistic portraiture with Kris Costa, from the 2018 Zbrush Summit. He gave some amazingly useful insights on how he manages to create his hyper realistic portraits, on how he makes some of the alphas and other techniques. A funny tip that actually worked for me really well was to turn the character upside down from time to time, in order to trick your brain into thinking you're working on a different project. In my case, I was using a Lightcap, so when I turned the model upside down, the light affected it in a totally different manner and I could easily pinpoint some of the mistakes I made.
The brush I used for the small wrinkles on the palms and back of the hand were made with the standard brush and a default Zbrush alpha.
I wanted the stitches and all the other small parts to be separate pieces of geometry, so I would later be able to use polypaint and bake an ID map for everything, including the small details. So I created InsertMesh brushes and Curve IM brushes for the regular stitches, the "x"-shaped stitches, the eyes of the rag-doll and so on. For the skirt and the belt I used Zbrush Noise and then manually sculpted some additional details on top. I still haven't started detailing the blouse and the crop top, since I'm a bit worried about the current tri count. The file is already pretty heavy and I think I should start working on the remaining parts in a separate file.(including the shoes and the guitar)
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