It’s been fun and rewarding to work on Survival Master over the years, and recently I had the good fortune to get tasked with creating new player characters for the game. This is a challenge for me since I have mostly done props modeling and 2D concept art, but I was eager to give it my best.
The first order of business when creating a character is to get some solid concept art going. I focused on the female player character first, but needed to keep in mind that we would eventually want a male counterpart in the same style. So, I did a few quick concepts of what both would look like and this is the image I submitted for approval.
On getting the “OK” from the team, I moved forward with the design. The next step in the process was to create a front and side view of the character so that I had a good base to model from. Since this was my first time modeling a full character, I fumbled a bit at this step. I attempted to create a human figure in 3DS Max from photo reference to move things along faster. After realizing this was a bad idea since I did not yet have a good character workflow down (or any character workflow for that matter), I ended up backtracking to the concept phase so I could have a clearer direction on where to go during the modeling phase.
This turned out to be a wise decision. I was able to get a general idea of where I needed my edges to go and what type of structure the character body had as I drew the orthographic views. It really forced me to slow down and think about what I needed to do before I jumped into the deep end and started modeling. With future character customization in mind, I drew two versions of the female character.
After that, I was back up and ready to get her built… Continued in Part 2 – The Rough Form.
