The King of Hoodlums

Hello! I'm back and surprisingly soon as well! I thought I should maybe try and time out my posts so that they aren't random, but I'm really just too excited about what I am currently working on to keep waiting to post about it.

Over the course of this quarter (RIT currently runs on the quarter system rather than the semester system) I have been developing this character for a game idea that I came up with. He started out as a doodle at first, but I got so attached to him that he ended up in two of my projects for school. 

  One of them was for a design doc for a video game that I ended up using this concept for since I had thought of it earlier in the quarter. The other is the final project for my Poly and Sub D class that I am currently still working on. 

 A quick bio on the character:

Name: King

Age: 10-11

Grade: He does not attend school, but if he did he would be in 5th grade

He's the leader of a gang of orphans known as the "hoodlums,” which includes him and at least four other children. He's a mischievous troublemaker, but he has generally honorable intentions. He is extremely loyal and does everything for his fellow Hoodlums which he sees as his family.

For the design doc I did this (top left) quick concept drawing of the character, which was okay for what I needed it for, but I really wanted to push it further. Once I found some time I revisited the image and added some red light to give it more of a dramatic feeling. 

It's still not quite at the point where I am ready to call it a finished picture, but since pushing this particular drawing further has become more of a side project it's something that has to wait until I can find time before I can work on it.

The Crown and the number "5" in the top right corner is his trademark and are actually painted on to the back of his jacket. They're just a prototype for the time being, and I intend on cleaning them up since they look more like they are dripping with blood rather than paint. 

For Poly and Sub D I have been working on modeling him. Here are some thumbnails of the different points of progress I had. He’s come a long way, but I'm still not quite done yet. I'm about 95% done with the model and am about to start texturing him. 

For the model I blocked him out in Autodesk Maya and refined the shapes. I took his face, jacket, and hat into Autodesk Mudbox to model in the wrinkles and folds. I contemplated doing the same thing for his pants, socks, and scarf, but I found that because i could easily add in edge loops and then use the slide edge tool to manipulate them that I had an easier time modeling them in Maya. 

I think that in most cases it may be easier for people to model them in Mudbox, but I am fairly new to it and find that I am somewhat messy at it. So when It came to spending a few hours in Mudbox trying to add in wrinkles and then having to fix them as opposed to one or two hours in Maya, i decided for now I wanted to go with what I was more comfortable with.

Here's what I have currently:

All of the modeling is done except his hands, the tails of his scarf, shoe laces for his left shoe, and his face which needs to be adjusted.

I made a quick texture for his jacket using Filter Forge. I will be making it much dirtier later on, but I wanted to test the base texture out so I threw a quick automatic map on him to see what it would look like. Once I UV him properly, I am going to take him into Mudbox and add some more details using displacement maps and normal maps, as well as possibly texture him in Mudbox using textures I make in Photoshop or Filter Forge. Once his model and textures are done I am going to redo the lighting and set him up for rendering and then try and add in hair. I tested hair out on him earlier which worked well I just haven't played around with the settings yet. 

Before I go, I want to ask if anyone has any characters over their own that they'd like to share or even characters in a TV show or comic that they particularly like. Leave comment and tell me about them. Who are they? What are they like? What do you like/hate about them?