Tracer

Daniel Letchford | Naomi Letchford

Final Product

Daniel Letchford_Project_Tracer.mov

About Tracer

This project is a 3D model of an unused character design of Tracer from the game Overwatch. For those who don't know who Tracer is, she's a British speedster from the 2016 multiplayer online-game. I decided I wanted to create this design of the character for all the fans of the Overwatch community and for my final project for this trimester.

Please find continue reading to read more!

Crew

Daniel Letchford

Email: 1017162@student.sae.edu.au

Social media links:

Artstation: danielletchford

Skillset: Communication, determination, adaptivity, Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop,

Naomi Letchford

Email: 1016208@student.sae.edu.au

Social media links:

Instagram: @nomimaecreative

Skillset: Illustator & Designer

Process

To start off, I decided on an unused design of the character Tracer, from Overwatch's art book. There were several unused designs to choose from, but I ended up choosing the one you see on the Right. This character design was created by Arnold Tsang, who created it for Blizzard Entertainment when they were creating the character for the game.

After choosing what design I was going to use, I started to break down the concept art into sections, like the jacket and then the shoes. Once I broke them down I gathered references I could use while modeling and texturing.

With the Concept art broken down into sections and I had all the references I needed, I moved on to creating a small turnaround I could use for modeling. I also drew the design of Tracer's Chronal Accelerator, the piece of equipment on her chest.

Having all my pre-production images and references I needed, I created a quick High Poly model that I could use to create the low poly base mesh in Maya using the tool Quad Draw to draw over the High Poly. I spent a lot of time here, improving and growing my skills at retopologizing and getting good clean edge flows. I think I did a pretty good job at creating the low poly model, but of course, I got a lot more to learn.

After I finished creating the Low Poly Model, I took the model into Zbrush to tighten some High Poly details before I took it into Substance Painter to create the textures. Now I need to confess, texturing, in general, is not my strong suit so I spent most of the time practising and playing around with creating textures.

In Substance Painter, I played around with the emissive maps which allowed me to create this amazing glowing effect which worked really well in Unreal Engine, the program I'll use later on to render this project.

After I created the textures, I created a quick rig with the help of Mixamo, an online program that auto-rigs a mesh and has hundreds of pre-created animation cycless like the dancing animation below, and it created a quick bone system I was able to use to create the final pose with the help of this reference.

With the rig and the textures created, I moved onto lighting and rendering in the Unreal Engine. I watched a few tutorials on how to use Unreal Engine as well as creating a good lighting environment, as this was my first time using Unreal Engine to present a model that I created. The lightning bolts took a little bit more time to get right and that gives the atmosphere that I was looking for.

At the end of it all is the post-production process, which for this project is just combining the video into the video-editing program, adding some music and text. The textfont for this project was actually customly made by a design student, Naomi Letchford, who created it as an interdisciplinary project. I’m really happy how the textfont came out and how it looks on the project.

There's still a lot for me to learn and improve on, but I am excited with what I’ve done and the improvements that I’ve accomplished. The project was a lot of fun and I want to thank all my family, friends and teachers here at SAE who helped me create this piece of fanart of Tracer.

Textfont designed by Nomi Letchford.

Interdisciplinary

I was asked to create this small little creature by another group for their Yagan Tower Project. I was happy to help and had a lot of fun creating them as you can see on the right, I had a bit of a laugh when I was creating the face.

I used Zbrush and Maya to create the body, and then Substance Painter and Photoshop to create the textures.

Specialization

I did a few minor projects before I took on the Tracer Project just to pratice a few of the techniques that I needed. I took a few days to pratice creating a body in Maya, and then I spent another few weeks in Substance Painter watching different tutorials and learning how to use it.

Near the begining I also spent some time in Zbrush, improving my skills and workflow. Thanks to that pratice I can now sculpt a much cleaner model in Zbrush, which I'm really happy about.

I tried to learn how to create my own custom Materials with the help of Substance Designer but its a big program and I only managed to create some fur. I'm keen to keep praticing and playing with the Substance Designer in the future.

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