This character was a one-off avatar we designed for "Pop Pals" which is a Solana NFT collection. These NFTs are 2D profile pictures of fun bubble-like characters and they wanted to have a 3D version that would be compatible as a playable avatar in Unreal Engine.
Role:
Character Artist
Industry:
NFT Collection
Duration:
4 weeks
Challenges
Interpretation: Since this was a 3D character based on profile picture the only thing we had to go off of was the head. The neck and below was all up to our interpretation and we ensured that the client was satisfied with the results.
Materials: Another fun challenge was the material of the character. Since it had the appearance of a bubble (hence pop pal) I toyed around with Fresnel and other ways to bend light and give the character a glossy and glassy feel.
Skeleton: The last challenge was creating a skeleton for a uniquely shaped character such as this who didn't really have much of a neck or visible joints due to its style.
My Approach
Design Phase
Modeling: As I do for most of my 3D models I started in Virtual Reality with Gravity Sketch. I modeled all the base parts of the avatar apart from the shirt.
Clothing: For the shirt I used a program called Marvelous Designer that allows you to customize garments and simulate cloth overtop of existing meshes (such as humans). Once I created the shirt I simulated the cloth overtop of the avatar and exported it as a separate mesh.
Materialization
Textures: Texturing this model was a breeze since the only thing that needed a complex texture was the shirt. I used Adobe Substance Painter to stamp on the little lollipop patterns that you see on its shirt.
Bubble Material: Like I mentioned in the challenges I had to create a unique bubble material in both Blender (for the renders) and Unreal Engine (for the game itself). I did this by combining practices I learned from materializing glass which is notoriously resource expensive in UE5.
Rigging and Integrating
Skeleton: The skeleton was fairly simple since it was a humanoid I just had to approximate where some of the joints needed to be because the character is so smooth and bubbly.
Weight Paint: Making sure that the body didn't intersect with the shirt, I hid the parts of the body that were not visible under the shirt. This is a great technique to not only improve clipping but also optimization as it removes extraneous polygons that would never otherwise be seen.
Conclusion
I'm really happy with the result of this character and so if the client. You can catch this little guy running around as one of the playable characters in Yaku's Solana-based MMORPG Metaverse.
