BGP – Week 3 – New Character

During the first weeks, since we didn’t want to use Unreals standard blue character but wanted to get the feel in rather quickly, we used a character I had previously made for class. With Alpha coming up however, it was time to switch it out for the actual character, which, obviously, meant creating it. Me and our Creative Director (Alex Untoro), sat down and had a thorough discussion on exactly how we wanted this character to look. Probably the biggest, iconic, thing that we wanted to incorporate, was the poncho. Let me give you a little back story on the character:

In Clouds Below the player plays as a young child (~10 years old), with undefined gender (Will be referred to as “He” for simplicity). His mother, unbeknownst to him, gave birth to him in the presence of the giant eagles of Nah’giie. Their natural magic was thus infused into him, giving him the power to control the wind. His mother then disappeared, leaving him in the care of the eagles. As the eagles were unfamiliar with caring for a human child, even though he had aspects of them in him, they soon flew down and left him to the elders of the human village.

As he grew up in the human village, although he initially looked like the rest, he always felt very different. Somehow he knew that he didn’t fully belong. Some time around his 8th birthday, an unbearable itch slowly started all over his arms. His muscles burned, the skin stretched, and eventually it was as if his whole arms were on fire. The cause of the itch revealed itself the morning after, as feathers started to grow all over his arms. Slowly at first, but steadily picking up speed. A few days later, the itching finally stopped, but it had left it’s permanent mark. Were his arms used to be, were now two giant wings instead. He now knew why he didn’t fit in with the rest of the village. He was a freak. Ashamed of his transformation, he quickly found a piece of cloth, big enough to hide his arms under. Afraid others would find out, rejecting him and casting him out from the village, he started keeping to himself a lot, often venturing away from the village. On one of his many ventures, he found a place, where he somehow felt at home. A small glade in the forest on one of the mountains. A strange, warm feeling filled his body and soul every time he went there. This quickly became his own little world. A place of peace and quiet, where he could meditate and experiment with his wind power.

This is why the poncho is so important. This is the first iteration of the character:

Initially, a big thing that we wanted to incorporate, was the inability to tell exactly what gender the character was. It wasn’t really important to the story itself, and we wanted players of all genders to be able to relate to the character physically if they wanted to. As we didn’t have a lot of time however, and getting to a good place with this, would take a lot of time to research and iterate, we decided to cover the character up a bit more, by giving him a hood. After a lot of discussion and back and forth, this is what we eventually landed on:

Jumping into Maya, I initially thought I’d use the previously created character as a base, to make things go quicker, but after a while I realized that it rather took *longer* to figure out what to change, than to just do it from scratch. So instead I switched to just start from the beginning, figuring that I could use the practise!

Since the clothes are so open and basically represent most of the characters body and silhouette, I started with this, trying to fit it over a quick blockout of the body.

Once that was done, I went on to the face, and feet. Turns out, modelling a characters face from only a single “front view” concept, is difficult..

And here is the, almost, finished result:

Until next time, let’s soar! OuO // Sky