Today I achieved a good stopping point in the modeling process for a new character. He comes in a little heavy at 10k vertices. Below is a render with vertex colors applied. UV unwrapping and texture painting will come soon. I like using colored materials early and apply to faces to get a feel for a finished piece instead of staring at the default clay gray. The downside perhaps would be vertex counts have the potential of going higher because of additional edge loops that get jammed in to separate material boundaries. It's just how I work. The upside, if you can give it one, is material islands can be easily selected when moving to the texture stage. I tried something a little different this go around with Blender by sculpting the form first and then a full retopology. I've resisted sculpting in the modeler because the tools never felt right coming from zBrush but giving it a fair chance, I happened upon a happy zone.
After finishing retopology, I was excited to get a rig on him and have a play. All honesty, I'm going have to work on it, but this quickie test was satisfying. Little dude's pretty cool. I still need to find my way around the graph editor to dial in keyframe curves, refine for anticipation and follow through but the rough keys look pretty good. At least to me.
Well, that's my first blog entry for my game project. The GameDev Project I'll publish once there is some game play. Thanks for the visit.
I'm sure it is very satisfying to go from a blank modeling screen to rigged character. Need to go check out your game project page.