Project Guppy
Project Guppy is an internal project of Twisted Mountain Animation. Starting as a small test sequence to help build out the company's Unreal Engine pipeline, it has grown over the years in scale and ambition to encompass a whole city's worth of assets and diverse cast of characters.
Assets for Project Guppy are modeled and textured for animation and rendering in Unreal Engine. As such, they are not subdivided on render and need to have enough topo in place to support a smooth appearance and clean transformations.
This character is named Dani, and she is Guppy City's first child. In designing her, I wanted her to look like she's always up to mischief. I was responsible for every aspect of her, including design, sculpt, retopology, UVs and texturing. I also posed her for renders, starting with the Rig and finishing in Zbrush. The soccerball she's standing on was modeled and textured by another artist, Giada Murgia.
Software Used: Autodesk Maya, Zbrush, Blender, Substance Painter and Photoshop
Lighting and rendering done in Unreal Engine 4
Sculpt and model
TMA's base mesh was used once again for this character. I started by re-sizing her in Maya, and then took it into Zbrush to refine proportions and features.
I went back into Maya to block clothing and accessories before heading back to Zbrush to sculpt high poly details for texture baking.
All total, from creating a mood board to final clean and completed model, Dani took about 20 hours of work.
Blend shape between Tammy base mesh and updated Dani body
Image taken from Substance Painter
texturing
In texturing Dani I wanted to use as many fun patterns and colours as I could. I wasn't so worried about making things match, as making things fun. She's a kid who dresses herself, I didn't want her to look too styled.
My favourite feature is her cast. I got all the members of the modeling and surfacing team at TMA to make doodles I could add to her cast. I signed all their names as well.
Body and clothing textures exported from Substance Painter
