FMP: Dr. Henrik Ottmeyer – Sculpture

Since I have sacrificed one more week for the second character I am now left with only two weeks to finish the third character. I usually spend the most time on the sculpture and textures, but now, with so little time left, I need to even out the time I spend during each stage.
I am very excited to start working on this character. When I chose the concept (concept by Andrew Mironov) I imagined I would try and make it in the style of Dishonored 2. I learnt a lot during this year, so I hope it will come out better than my last attempt at Dishonored art style. Before starting out, I had a chat with an amazing artist who actually got to work on a few Dishonored 2 characters. He gave me a lot of feedback on what I had so far and advised me to pay more attention to certain aspects, such as good topology and face anatomy. He explained to me in depth what I should aim for when retopping my characters and for the face anatomy, he suggested that I should use 3d scans as reference.

After gathering my references, I started blocking in the base mesh with Zspheres in Zbrush as I usually do. When all the main volumes were in place, I imported my model to MD and worked on the clothing. The apron was especially tricky to do in MD because every time I tried to simulate everything it would either fall off the model or intersect with the shirt and pants. I somehow managed to get a decent looking result. However, the folds did not look stylized at all, so I had to work on each piece of clothing individually to get a more “angular” look.

I had planned on spending 4 days on the sculpture, 3 days on the retopology, one for the UVs, three days on textures and 3 days rigging/presenting the character. For the most part I managed to stick to my plan. Regarding the sculpture, I tried to focus more on the anatomy of the face, but with only 4 days to spare it was a bit hard not to neglect the other areas. My tutors suggested that I should make the shoes look more realistic, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to go back and redo them. I also wanted to work a little more on the folds, but I ended up leaving them as they are.
I had already exported the character to 3ds Max when I realized that Dishonored characters have unusually large hands, so I had to rescale them in max. I am not entirely happy with how the sculpt turned out, but I told myself that I would try and compensate by good topology and nice textures.