My Process Making a Character - Funga

September 17th, 2024

My first blog post hoorrrayyI wanted to make a proper model for my main character for the longest time. I learnt so much at college I was able to create exactly what I've always wanted to accomplish.This wasn't my first attempt though, my firsts were rough. I also couldn't rig or animate. I could only model him, and barely texture him properly.

First attempt on the left, textured. Second attempt on the right, vertex painted.
Both had extremely bad topology, rendering them both un-animatable.

Original drawings I did for the model's references.

I've always wanted to make a game of my own, so for this new model I wanted it to be game ready. I also wanted it to be non-realistic and more cartoony.For this model I'll be using my newest 2024 reference sheet I drew as a ref for this model, specifically his main outfit.

I used three programs to make this rig. Maya, ZBrush and Substance Painter.I first started in ZBrush on low resolution and tried to sculpt the head. After a solid 15 minutes of being unable to get the shape I wanted I chose to make the shape in Maya and bring the fbx into Zbrush after.

I made it just by extruding a cylinder and scaling it.

In ZBrush I used subtool spheres and the move tool to sculpt out where I wanted the spots on the head to be.

I'll be using this as a base to plan out the proportions of the rest of my model.I used zspheres to plan out the body of my model, for my own ease and for future outfit changes. Funga will be naked for now.

When I was done planning out zspheres I made a adaptive skin from it.I set it to a low dynamesh resolution and sculpted the body till I got a shape I liked. Then I sculpted clothing over it on another subtool.

I made the body this way so if I ever wanted to go back and make new clothes for him I'd have a solid base to do so.I also hopped around a bit while making the model, I re-typologized the body before I sculpted the clothes.

After my base sculpt was done I exported the entire thing as a fbx and brought it into Maya. Then using live surface and quad draw I drew over the shape to create the topology I needed to animate. Though the head and hands took a couple tries to get right. I needed my hands to not pinch too much while also keeping my triangle count low. As for the head I wanted all the spots to be squishable while also having his head as a whole be squishable, so I chose to make it one piece to avoid any separating or weird shifting.

I also found it way easier to copy the underside of the original base model I used for the head and just lowering the triangles a bit instead of trying to recreate the whole thing. It is still as bendy as I wanted it to be.

After that I continued topologizing the clothing. I also removed any skin underneath the clothing to reduce triangles, but kept a copy of the original body for future clothing. I made any final touch edits to my model at this point. My final triangle count for my base geo is 10,386 tri.

I chose to do my UVs after all my models were done, I decided I wanted this to be on a single UV tile. It didn't take very long. There's no baking in this model either so I was able to stack some UVs and save some space. I stacked the hands, pants and shoes. I was keeping the texture to pretty basic colors but I still made sure I had seams in good places.

I exported my UV'd model as a fbx and brought it into substance painter. I wasn't planning on doing much so I just masked off parts I wanted to be certain colors, I color picked the colors straight from the reference sheet with PureRef open. I wanted to make a pretty simple texture to mimic my own art style. I drew on the entire shoe texture by hand and made a texture asset to put his name on his pant pockets. This bit took a bit more time than I expected it to but it was fun.

After exporting my final texture I applied it in Maya, Then went onto rigging. I was really looking forward to this, I chose to do it from scratch on my own, It took a while to set up my base bone structure and put controls everywhere I needed to but I found that repetitive task fun. Changing the way controls look is fun, even if its just a line.
I made sure my joint orientation was the same direction, made sure all my controls had their own group. Everything builds on top of each other to put this rig together, and that's pretty cool.

I didn't struggle much with the rig, I even made a FK/IK swap as well which was some fun node work. I set up some driven keys for the fingers and custom attributes for them. During the entire process of making my dude I learned things along the way as I did them.Thanks for reading!