By Emma Mandera
How does someone with only prop experience tackle modeling a character? This was a challenge that I had to overcome as a character artist on the Treble Thieves team. My name is Emma. I am a concept artist and part-time prop modeler for game projects. I never had the opportunity to take an organic modeling class before this project, and I only had the knowledge from my hard surface class to work with. Thankfully, I was able to successfully model a game-ready character through resources online and the amazing support of my leads.
Before I began modeling Trumpet, I took our key art of her and created an orthographic drawing. This served as my reference as I modeled her. I followed an incredible tutorial on Youtube from James Taylor. He showed how to model a semi-realistic bodybuilder character ready to be animated. Of course, Trumpet is not a bodybuilder nor a male as the tutorial demonstrated, so I took what I could from the video and modified it to suit Trumpet’s leaner, feminine build. I also had lots of help from my lead who had experience with character modeling!
The modeling itself started with rough block outs of the biggest shapes then moving into more complex parts of her body like the hands and face. This was all done in Autodesk Maya. Once the body was done, I shifted to modeling her clothes. For the first semester this was only a very basic version so we could have something to show at the Stout Game Expo. The clothes were mostly replaced in the second semester to better match the reference and have a higher quality. To better suit animation needs, her scarf was modified as well. Her textures were created in Adobe Substance Painter. The last image attached shows how she currently looks in engine. Trumpet’s model has been rigged, and motion capture was used to capture animation data. Soon, players will be able to see Trumpet run and twirl on their screens!
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