The Ghost Captain

For my production project I have decided upon making an animated character. This particular one is a ghost of a captain corrupted long enough to assimilate the very nature of his demise... Anyway, I have chosen to make use of Blender to do the bulk of the modeling, rigging and animation as well as Sculptris as an auxiliary tool for putting detail and adding extra polygons to the model. The game engine of choice ended up being the Unreal Development Kit.

I admit I did not have much time to work on this project due to a lack of a workstation and physical crippling disabilities which have prevented me from attending lectures on multiple occasions, making me essentially housebound. Since this term was an exercise in production and exploring new tools for apprehending the process of the pipeline I have decided to shift from the standard choice of static mesh scenery into something a little more unique. The model itself averages on the 10000 polygons and uses specific settings to give the material a liquid appearance.

The process I have taken went as follows:

Model the base mesh.

Before I started on the model I have agreed upon borrowing Andrew O'Brien's conceptual sketch and made a few alterations. The survival horror genre isn't my forte so my design and eventual mesh turned out to match more into the action genre.

I used Blender to box model the base of the mesh, which was largely the undetailed upper part of the body which was symmetrical.

Sculpt the rest of the model.

At this stage I have exported the model over to Sculptris to add the rest of the detail to the mesh. I could not get all the results I wanted but it did the job.

Retopology.

The detailed model was imported back into Blender for retopologising. This was one of the more time-consuming parts due to a few mistakes I have made on my part due to the model's arms not being spread out, giving me more work than necessary.

Unwrapping UVs.

This part was relatively easy due to the user-friendliness provided by Blender when it comes to creating seams for unwrapping organic models. Care has been taken to accommodate enough room for margins and avoid bleeding. This would aid me for the next step.

Baking normal map and diffuse.

I overlaid the high resolution model over the low poly one and baked a normal map out of it. This procedure took some adjustments due to the bias overlapping with other faces on the model. A diffuse map bake followed right after.

Build an armature and rig weights on the mesh.

After everything was said and done I've built an armature underneath the model and promptly painted weights while posing it. The armature itself went under a few changes as I have been using UDK, learning how crucial a proper structure is. Originally I intended to have the "water arms" rigged to several bones as to achieve specific animations, though I quickly learned that it's bad practice and would be better off using morphs (which I didn't do for this model).

Do an idle animation.

I'm not really well versed with animation nor did I have a lot of time to create all the ones, so my attempt at creating a simple animation wasn't what I was aiming for. Fortunately it was quite entertaining to manually animate the character's head and tongue, giving the ghost a sense that it is seeking things out.

Set up the model as a skeletal mesh.

Once the model was technically finished on Blender I exported it as a Maya .fbx file and reimported it to UDK, sorting everything out inside their own package. Since the file was technically from Blender I image most of the assets weren't adjusted to conform with the import, so I had to take of these issues myself. In particular, the armature was broken and the liquid material I have set up did not work at all, so these two had to be dealt with promptly.

Assign a proper material.

I wanted to make the ghost have a liquid appearance rather than go for a fleshed out texture. Unfortunately due to time limits and difficulty of the endeavour as well as the engine not translating the original material I have made on Blender I modified an existing one on the game engine itself to suit my needs and adapted a decent substitute.

After all this all I did was fine tune and polish the mesh a bit more so the weights adjusted better and the animation was more... Animated.