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.
Meet Gran, Guppy City's resident cookie baking ray of sunshine. 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
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 created her costume, hair and accessories in Maya, giving them a high poly sculpt pass in Zbrush for texture baking.
All total, from creating a mood board to final clean and completed model, Gran took about 45 hours of work.
Blend shape between Tammy base mesh and updated Gran body
Image taken from Substance Painter
texturing
Just like with the cat's surfacing I tried to approach Gran using mostly hand painting. Especially for her face, body and hair. When it came to her clothing I tried layering more procedural techniques using the baked mesh maps with some hand painted accents to speed up my process and create smart materials that could be used on subsequent characters.
Body and clothing textures exported from Substance Painter
