Hey there, how are you?
I've been both busy and not busy. Went back to school for two months to take Machinist courses. Kind of stressful, as I have absolutely no experience and the course assumes you have been an apprentice for about a year. But I passed.
So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.
Been playing a lot of XCOM 2 lately as well. Modded, of course. I think the only games that really hold my attention for long periods of time are the ones that have a lot of mods available. And I have dabbled a little in making my own as well. So, after many hours of playing, I got the idea I would learn how to do it for XCOM 2. I also want to get better at 3d sculpting and this gives me an opportunity to do both at the same time.
Speaking of 3d sculpting, look at this goblin.
But, back to XCOM. I had the idea of making a base model that I could use to make a series of other mods with. Maybe a few different base models in different styles. Using the art of J. Scott Campbell as a reference, I started creating what I've been calling the "Abbey Body". It's the name of one of the characters in his comic Danger Girl.
I used Unreal Editor to export a mesh to use for the skeleton and as a guide, namely SM_SldCnvLgt_Reference_All_A_F. I found a YouTube video (Here) from Bran Sculpts that was immensely useful for starting off. "Blocking out" was just adding cubes, subdividing them, stretching them out until they fit the area I wanted, and extruding them if necessary.
So, after finishing that, it looks like this.
Kind of wandered away from my reference image and made the hips and thighs a little bigger. Definitely more exaggerated than the model I had exported from the game.
Next, I had to join all the subdivided cubes into one model and remesh it to make it one singular part. It was at this stage I realized I messed up the fingers and had to go back and redo them. They were kind of blobby and wanted to fuse together when I tried remeshing. So, mistakes were made, and not the first one either.
Sculpting was next. I smoothed out all the seams and tried to add in some detail. Not a lot, as I don't think the game would appreciate a million polygon model running around. I got to use the graphics tablet I bought impulsively and haven't used much.
This bad boy (girl?) has over 4 million faces and takes up 1.69 GB of memory. I think I got everything mostly looking okay. Still kind of odd looking though.
Now, retopology! Bleagh.
And then, there we go. A base mesh ready to use. Mostly. I forgot edge smoothing was a thing, so my initial attempts at texturing resulted in a disco ball like appearance. Took me a little bit to figure that one out.
So, first thing to make? A catsuit. Why? Pretty simple to make, just need to put a collar on it and cut a hole for the head.
Would XCOM soldiers be running around in a catsuit? Nope. But less worrying about immersion, more learning how to make stuff.
