The character design has to reflect their corresponding archetype and from the visuals alone you should be able to have a good grasp of the type of person they are. All of the designs I've also noticed either have fully or half-covered sleeves and trousers, this is so that the animation team has a better time with creating the unique rigs without there being anything in the way of the vital joints. Another thing to keep in mind is the customizability of these characters as well, many articles of clothing are created in mind with being able to be swapped out and changed in colour for the player to change at will. 

However, there is another type of costume they use called Personas, they cover the fullbody and due to this they end up not having to be as restricted to the previously mentioned style system. In my case I will end up making a full-body costume as well since I do not plan to switch out the character's clothing but instead have variation of colours that can be treated like an alternative skin. This would be the recoloured variant made on the right , I will likely stick to the original concept's colours for the time being as to not stray from the artist's original intentions with this design but after hand in the edits can be made easily with HSL editor in Substance Painter.

Since the Pioneer character was my first project to work on, I was able to borrow the base mesh for the hands, face and body to have a starting off point that was cleaned up already to work from. The hands I used a retopologized version and updated it by widening the fingers and squaring everything more off so it looked more masculine and less dainty.  Even if I had to dynamesh or alter the topology later down the line, due to the basemesh being the same I can always morph it into fitting in place for the correct retopology to be put back.

I used the base head from my previous Pioneer project as a base mesh since it had some very primative facial shapes put in place to work from. A lot was edited since the previous mesh had exaggerated and enlarged eyes annd this wouldn't have matched up well with my concept. 

Once I got the main silhouette of the face down like pushing up the eyes and cheekbones, I started to get closer to more accurately capturing my character's likeness and defining features.

Since the initial plan was to make them fit the Sea of thieves style, I was making the limbs be really skinny since even the characters on the bigger end had really small calves and feet. However, this looked really strange for the concept I had chosen and it also happened to have a lot less handpainted texturing which would have made it more difficult to stay true to the chosen concept. 

The face sculpt I was working on to capture his likeness also didnt lend itself so well to the Sea of Thieves style so by this stage I decided to keep the face sculpt staying almost the same but heavily adjust the body and lean into the Wayfinder artstyle for a better direction instead.

I had some feedback from peers and lecturers since I was struggling with pushing the proportions in a stylized way so to remedy this I went back to the basics and closely followed male anatomy for a rough block out. Its easier to stylise it later this way as opposed to working the other way around since I don't have the best initial grasp of anatomy to begin with which is why i end up struggling with it so much.

The hands here were made proportional to the body but the problem is that the concept has such exaggerated proportions that they end up looking out of place. I ignore this for now and later end up enlarging the gloves alongside making the lowpoly of the coat to make sure that the sleeves fit into the gloves seamlessly.

Dynamesh and polish paired together give me a really clean base to work onto , one problem I kept having early on is that his features were too rounded off which made him look like a much kinder man than in my concept so I ended up closing his eyes more and making the browbone look much more pronounced. This not only makes him look more masculine but also older.

The beard was really fun to sculpt as you just go crazy with the dam standard brush and make sure a negative cut is right next to a positive one for that lovely sharp edge. I made the strands flow in a way that leads your eyes towards the face and follows the existing contours as a beard would naturally do when it is shaped/styled like this.

Learning my lesson from the previous project, I decide to merge the hairs down early on on this project and go with a dynamesh + polish combination to clean things up. Some of the areas were too close together and ended up fusing when not intended to so I ended up splitting some strands apart with their own geometry so they can be animate separately. This would be referring to the strands in particular as they would need to be able to flow on their own. I did however have feedback which is true that I ended up giving this old man too much lucious hair which is a bad habit of mine since I enjoy rendering and sculpting hair so much but I like the result so I push onwards.

A big initial struggle of mine when starting to sculpt the clothing folds was first understanding where the correct placement of them would be naturally before going in to try and stylize them . To remedy this , I took a similar pair of fitting trousers and high topped boots and did a quick photoshoot to gather more references from multiple angles to get a better understanding of where bunching would be expected. Since I am a lady though these trousers ended up being  lot more form fitting than I would have liked for this purpose but it was still useful to gather first hand reference to better understand how the trousers would fold when bunched up to fit inside of a boot. 

Here you can see that on the left I used the wayfinder style reference closely and tried to replicate thise folds more as opposed to the right side which was staying more true to the real references I had just taken. The realistic side ended up not only being too muddy to work from but it also ended up exaggerating the folds too drastically to fit the type of more looser fit that I would have initially aimed for so it aligns with the straight legged trousers Old Jack has.

Really rough first start and you can tell that I was very aimless on howw to start off and what to focus on first, at this point I remembered that I felt more comfortable using retopology to clean up my blockouts like I did with my Pioneer character so I take a step back to do this in 3Ds Max before moving forwards any further with something I'm unhappy with.

I took a closer look at some of Overwatch's character models and the bearded characters like Hanzo end up following the same rules and thererefore animate gracefully, I am however concerned with my characters size of beard having some possible clipping issues if the jaw was to be unhinged to its maximum as the underside of the chin may dig into the neck due to where the hair ends up stopping in my concept. I'm hoping this is not too much of an issue however since I have not made a mouthbag to do such a pose and the bandana should hide the viewer from being able to view him from this underside angle regardless.

The initial blockout of the hat was a great base for the retop for which I then pulled the verts manually to capture the cuts and edges of the hat. The hat ended up somewhat low-poly with only 1k tris including the band around it but I don't see it necessary to go any higher since going more shape-heavy is what the concept has going on anyway.

The blockout boot was atrocious, the only part I used was the vamp of the boot but cleaning up everything else was thanks to retop saving the day again. I bent the top of the boot to make it seem as if folding over to capture the same silhouette read as the concept's. 

The leather strap was also really easy to add by duplicating a copy of the loop around the boot and extruding it but not with too much . An extra floating mesh is used for both the leather strap that that is sticking out and the 

The great thing about retopping the base body mesh first is the fact that I can get it to easily line up with the vest top and have the necessary animation loops in the correct placement as well. This made it overall pretty seamless and the highpoly blockout was a great indicator for where the seams and the vest neck hole would be.

After extruding the vest for some thickness and deleting the unused backfaces, I was left with a lovely border for the vest collar which I made a copy of to retop the collar ontop of and better cleaned up the collar shapes.

Previewing the silhouette in Zbrush helps me see if the shape language is effective in conveying what each segment of the body is meant to be. Currently its hard to see everything going on since the big coat has been in the way and I still ahve to add in the shoulder padding that will make them look more triangulated but despite this I am really glad to have retopologized everything so that I have a cleaner base to work from. I have followed the curves against straights rule in my sculpting ans htis can be most visible when looking at a closeup of the sleeve folds, its unfortunate that I cant sculpt many folds into the coat since that is something that will have to be posed in place instead. 

Texture variation using slope blur and manually painting in more worn-down shapes and areas. It's a really simple yet effective result.

Some potential poses based on what I could find online for cowboy poses, I really do love both variants but I think posing the hands to fully hold the belt will be more difficult so I will probably lean towards that ends up being easier to do and achieve a similar result.

The Mixamo posing attempts were good for getting an idea of how to pose him in the first place since I did not have anything in mind yet. I did however, wish I could combine elements from both of the poses on the right like the hand o the belt paired with the tipped forward hat. This is something that can only be replicated if done by hand and it would help feed into a similar narrative element that can be seen in the concept artwork. His face will be covered with some of it being in shadow which would also be deliberate to help make him look more mysterious and like he keeps to himself.

Most of the Wayfinder characters I have found have a simple lighting setup with a rimlight focused on one side of the character, generally a cool light to contrast the warm tones of the skin and simpler / white fill lights to show off the true texture colours. I will end up making my character have more moody colours to help him look more mysterious since he's not being displayed as an asset in a Tpose but as someone living in the moment.

Again I am really pleased with the saturation of the colours in the face and this paired with the dirt mask helps add subtle aged look especially when paired with a vignette which is commonly associated with older film that was shot on tape back in the day.

This character also has so much more potential to be greater than he already is, he just needs some revisiting for the degree show so he can be even more polished and properly finished up to get there. I have listed below where I thought my successes and faults lie and what I can add to improve on him.

What went well and what have I learned from this project

Optimization

• Due to the stylised shapes and sharp shapes in Old Jack's design, I managed to optimise him enough so that he only consists of 37k tris overall which I am really pleased with. He also has a good amount of loops necessary for animation with a good consideration of maintaining an even quad space all throughout.

Sculpting Clothing folds

• I still have a long way to go and so much more to learn about the anatomy of clothes but for this project I am really pleased with how I managed to stylise them and still utilise them in a way that informs which folds would be embedded in like at the back of the knees or the inner elbow folds

Adhering to an art style

• The sculpting style of Wayfinder can be wonky at times to help sell a certain narrative like having dents in metal to make it look more dinged up or scratches for variation. Some of these details could have been textured in instead however and a lot of areas do end up being mirrored in terms of sculpt so I had to make sure my character was not too repetitive all over despite his design being symmetrical. This was done mainly by adding variation of folds and placements in a similar position but not quite the same on both sides. Another way of doing this was unwrapping pieces without stacking them to leave room for more texture variation later down the line.

It could have been better if...

Hand-painted Textures

• Only the base layers of this character were laid down with simple diffuse, I'm glad I managed to use some PBR elements for the reflections in the metal for example but I wish I had allocated more time for the entire character to be covered in hand-painted textures as initially planned. It was a big reason as to why I picked the Wayfinder art style to focus on in particular so I definitely missed out some of the charm that does come with hand-painted work due to this lack of time management. I can also have a go at using 3D coat for this as it's also a program I did not have a chance to yet conquer the learning curve of using and can be another software to have knowledge of how to use under my belt.

Sculpting confidence

• I have found myself in both projects relying more on being able to clean up my sculpts through retopology and then bringing it back into Zbrush for cleanup and sculpting. Most of my work and blockouts end up super muddy but it does get a base idea across, it would just be something to improve on with more practice in my own time since this did end up taking a lot of going back and forth for a clean result.

What I would like to go back to implement and why

More shader work

• A skin shader to add ambient occlusion on the extremities like the nose and ears would have helped me match the concept better and make him look more alive. After researching and finding about a tech artists work on Wayfinder, I found that they also implemented an anisotropic metal shader that creates a subtle yet effective way to stylize the reflection of metal and the direction it's facing. I believe I can achieve a similar effect but with texturing instead  by using Very Normal Paint (By Andrea Orioli)  so painting normal directions of my meshes. This tool has released a few days before the hand in deadline so I had no chance to test this out but I would love to see if this implements well for certain areas.

Props being added

• All of the weapons being removed also lost a lot of his character since he was completely adorned with them like a veteran wearing his badges of honour. Atleast the main big hero prop shovel has to be made to help him have his essense back and make it better match the initial concept work.

Conclusion

I am not familiar with sculpting males at all yet alone an elderly character, this was a great challenge for me to overcome but I am certain I did a great job of at least capturing the Wayfinder artstyle essence as much as I could in the time I had. Despite all of this, I found myself solving a lot of issues and problems along the way quicker due to me tackling the pioneer character first which had a lot more complicated aspects to her and lots of elements I had to better redesign so it translates well on a 3D character. This guy is no exception to this either and some changes had to be made too but nothing as drastic as the previous character. 

In hindsight, if I knew I wanted to work with the Wayfinder artstyle I may have picked a concept in which the character would have already fit the universe much better, something more fantastical. But since I did not make my mind up early on I ended up going down this path and there were some issues I had to overcome like the fact that most Wayfinder designs have joints that aren't obscured and are free from aspects that may limit movement. One great example being the massive shoulder pads that would definitely clip if the arm moves too high upwards or forwards but this was an oversight on my behalf regardless.

Overall I am still glad I went through with this character as well since I learnt so much all throughout the process, I definetly found myseelf speeding along with him likely due to more confidence with my predetermined workflows that ended up working well from the Pioneer project.

I have however found that