Mask of Oni - Possessed

[Rhythem02]

HI! This is what I have been doing lately.

This is "Mask of Oni - Possessed". It's a low poly game character.
I finished it with 29,363 tris or 16,575 polys.

Concept
I started without any solid concept in mind. I was watching Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood and got inspired by one of the character. Sig Curtis, he has an interesting solid silouet. He's huge but not actually leaning on the usual muscular super hero guy.

As for the supporting theme I initially decided that it should be a uniformed guys, influenced by Fullmetal. But that design later on got discarded because it always ended up looking like a huge guys version of splinter cell by ubisoft.
After looking from some inpiration from the internet I ended up on an idea of creating a possessed monk.

Sculpting
This area is the easiest, after sculpting the basemesh of the body and getting the initial silouet I decimated it and exported in Max. Then from there I created a base model of the whole costume then brought them back to ZBrush for sculpting.

LowPoly Convertion
The usual process, I decimated all of the sculpt then brought them to max the modelled a low poly version over it.
I gave myself a 30K tris budget and initially ended with 44K tris. It's a bit of a challenge deciding which detail would be modeled or which detail would be relied on normal map. In the end I sacrifice the beads on the right forarm, the rope around the body connecting the shoulder armor, the waist, the face mask and the oni head was reduced a couple of times.

UVMap
Since a lot of details is involved and I would like to minimize mirroring, I decided to divide them into 3 parts. The UpperBody - from waist up, Lower Body, the Shoulder Armor and Staff, 2048x2048.

Texturing
I want to compact my process so instead of baking the normal map then a different process for texturing, I did polypainting instead. Baking the normal map, texture map and AO in one process.....sweet. Though polypainting is system intensive since you need to subdivide your sculpt up to a number where you have a good resolution, its really worth doing because editing the seams are minimized.

Lighting
I just used a simple 3 point light and an additional omni light placed at the lower area.

Rendering
I used different packages in rendering. Since this is a low poly model I would like to see how it translate in a game environment. I tried it on Xoliul and marmoset. Those 2 just gives a kick and shows a lot of the texture details in viewport. As for the 3 beauty shot they are rendered in max then with a very minimal post work, just color correction and background.

Hope you like what I did. Until the next project.
I would like to hear your comments.

[inveni0]

Great work. A little like a demonic Ewok.

[Rhythem02]

Hahaha, thats nice

[omessler]

Very nice work!