I`ve been plugging away at this, a little here and a little there. I threw in a quick rig so I could pose her, and have also started to play around with some lighting…She is still far from complete, I still need to work on the textures for her weapons and feet. I would also like to give her upper body, face and hair another pass too.

She is currently weighing in at around 10k polys and is using 2 2k texture pages, with variations for diffuse, normal and specular maps. These can in theory all be scaled down to 1k maps if needed.

Not long to go now, I am hoping she will be completed by the end of next week

Oh, I have also given her a name - Athria

Managed to get some time on my new character over the past few days so I made a start on her textures. I have worked the skin tones, the hair and am now working on her armour…

Below is a quick screen grab…remember this is still the game resolution model

Her hair is just a quick texture at the moment, so I still need to work on the alpha map and also add a normal map to bring out the detail. I also need to add a specular map to vary how shiney her skin and armor are.

There will hopefully be another update next week…

My new game character is now fully UV`d and I have started work on her textures. As you can see below I have a basic diffuse map, which is a combination of flat colours and an occlusion layer, and also a normal map for surface details.

The next step is to start to work on more details into the diffuse and normal maps. At present she is clean and plastic so I need to rough her up a little, give her the correct skin and metal tones and also adjust the main colours.

With the high resolution model almost done it was time to turn to the real time version. For this I exported the proxy model, (lower resolution version of the Silo model) which gave me the perfect foundations to begin working on.

Some elements however were too low poly to work directly upon, so I added a single smooth to these before export.

Now came the fun part. Time to reduce this base model to my goal count of around 10,ooo polys. Once I was close to this I then needed to check the topology, this is an important step to make absolutely sure the model is spot on before you make the final adjustments and move onto the UV`s.

Applying a quick automatic UV set gave me a great starting point. Now, with a preview normal map generated I could quickly see the problem areas, places along seams or around detail areas which had been optimized before, meaning the normal map looked distorted. Adding back in a few polys now meant I could fix these areas now before I spend time on the final UV set.

Below is a quick grab showing the game model, and the same one with the temperary normal maps applied. She still needs work though

I have started work on a couple of personal projects. The first is a Cyber type action girl who you can see below. She is intended to be a real time game model so at present I am concentrating on the high resolution, normal map mesh.

I am doing this character because I havn`t added any recent game art to my portfolio in a while. I have been working on lots of game art, the problem is it is all under NDA until next year

My other project I am keeping to myself for now. Its going to be a 2D piece, thats all I will say