Worklog - Archer

5/16/07 - (WIP)

It was now time to revamp the archer. She looked almost as crappy as the first iteration of the bear. This model looks like was struck in the face with a sledge hammer while wake-boarding.



Yup, that's the archer in the game right now. Pretty terrible. No style, no expression, and worst of all no polygons! Shes seriously like 8 polygons or something. It's scary.

It's time to get some sexy up on this be-otch. She needs new clothes, a new face, and oh lawdie some new hair. And fast. I'm surprised the game didn't crash from her being in it - simply because it couldn't process how shitty she looks.

I popped open Photoshop and redrew this monstrosity of a female.



I quickly had a sketch of the new archer. This was the direction I wanted to take with her. Keep the clothing to a minimum, but keep the clothes that she had on somewhat stylish!

Next I had to sketch up some front and side views as a reference to model the new archer from.



Now I have the archer from the front and side views I can start modeling her.

After a long (and slightly sexy) rendezvous with 3dstudio creating the model and Conflict holdin' down the speakers, I had the archer model. I pulled verts around till my eyes hurt, but I finally had a result I was very happy with.



Like the bear, I added a bunch of 2d planes to be the flat parts of the archer. Parts that would have otherwise taken up too many polygons as a 3d object, such as the hair. I also used it for extensions, such as the shirt hanging off the chest and the lower part of the skirt.





Now I had to make her accessories, such as her bow, quiver and dagger holster.



This was a very quick process compared to modeling the rest of the archer. The shapes were all pretty basic.

The archer was now ready for mapping! We all know this is my favorite part of the modeling process (Not!) (Oh by the way, I'm to bring back really bad 90's trends such as saying 'not' after things you sarcastically said you enjoy. Some of the most groovy sayings have been phased out for some reason.)

I turned on some Atmosphere, layed down on the ground, opened my mouth and prepared to be shat on by 3dstudio's unwrap modifier.



Hours later, I was finally ready to start texturing. In this worklog I want to focus a bit more on the texture. Since the archer doesn't have that many components, a lot of detail can be put into the skin.

First, I exported my unwrapped wire mesh. I colored in all the shapes with a basic fleshy color.



Which yielded this...



A scary, naked archer-thingy. The idea here was to get the skin tones correct. Adding in some rosy colors in some main area gives the base texture a bit of variation and doesn't look so fake.

Next I had to get basic light values. This is an extremely important step in making the texture look believable. Even though there is lighting in the game, there are some parts of the mesh I can assume will always be in shadow.





Already that made a huge difference. The model is very believable without any detail whatsoever. Remember this is baked-in shadow, no lights exist in this scene.

Now it was time to block out some basic color components, such as the clothing.



Perfect! I'm happy with the colors, and the basic feel of the unit. Now was the fun part. Time to get in there and add detail to the skin and face.



More detail...





I kept plugging away on the texture until I finally had the final texture.





I'm pretty happy with the results. Next comes rigging!

I added all the bones...



I got her animated up and threw it in the game!



She lost a lot of detail, but still looks good.

And that's The Archer worklog!