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 loveable curmudgeon is Guppy City's resident old man, Gramps. I was responsible for ever aspect of this character, from design, sculpt, retopology, UVs and texturing, and finally posing for renders.
Software Used: Autodesk Maya, Zbrush, Blender, Substance Painter and Photoshop
Lighting and rendering done in Unreal Engine 4
Sculpt and model
Gramps, like Gran, was created using TMA's Tammy base mesh as a starting point. I brought the base mesh into Zbrush to adjust proportions and features.
From there, 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, Gramps took about 20 hours of work.
Blend shape between Tammy base mesh and updated Gramps body
Image taken from Substance Painter
texturing
Using what I learnt from the cat and Gran's surfacing, I feel like I really hit a stride with Gramps' textures. I reused the smart materials on his clothing I created for Gran, and continued with the more hand-painted approach for his body and hair.
All of his clothing and accessories are directly inspired by clothing my own grandfather wore.
Body and clothing textures exported from Substance Painter
