Imperial - Creation Process

Imperial - Creation Process

Lets get into it then, I first started this project without even the desire to make a model. I wanted to initially just make some robotic legs for sale but instead I had a few additional ideas on what to work on such as clothing, tails and even had the thought on cybernetic animal inspired gear.

Leg creation process

I have been working on shoes from scratch a few times and thought I could apply the same techniques to actually making metal / hard surface stuff. I knew I wanted to have finer details as well such as a piston, wires, maybe a battery stuff similar to that. You know, cyber shit. I didn't really have a design going into this so I just started making it, using modifiers like Mirror, Subdivision surface, Bevel and Solidify I got to creating. The results of these combined is a flat shape that you can easily manipulate into a 3D shape as shown below.

I used this technique to build out a base of what I wanted the leg to look like, using an existing armature to determine where the knee and the ankle will be on the model. Somehow I managed to keep the poly count at 5599 polys for these entire process until a little bit later where I add a few more details to make it more fitting for full body. It still remains under 6k polys per leg though which I am very happy with. I didn't go into this with the intention to make an optimized leg it just happened.

Leg Texturing

I had to get the leg ready for the UV maps... and needless to say this process was fucking pain. Trying to find where I want the seems to lay and overall unfolding this leg like origami was not an easy task, it was not the cleanest end result either but I finally got it done and put into Substance Painter. I knew I wanted a more "Organizational" look to the leg, something that says corporation so I went down the route of hard blacks and gold with white informative details. Here are the end results of that.

I'm happy with the results of how it came out, it looks pretty industrial to me and almost militarized which is why I wanted to base the rest of my outfit around this color scheme and almost make a cyber army girl in a sense. Off the back of this I also decided to make a tail as well. The tail was created in a very similar way however with 1 major change. I made 1 piece and then used array curves to make it flow and position exactly how I wanted.

Using a combination of these techniques I managed to continue and create a set of items that were completely made in blender and then unwrapped for Substance Painter.

I wanted to make a body suit as well but doing this in blender seemed more tedious than fun so I took it into a software called Marvelous Designer which is made to create clothing. This was much easier and very quickly I was able to create the body suit type I wanted. After taking this into marvelous and spending a few hours staring at it not knowing what to do I finally came out with an idea.

Next up will be the body texturing and I really wanted to add more cybernetics to the model to kind of make her look like an android or at least a half android with primarily human proportions so I kept to all cyber stuff on the base to just textures. So we dive yet again into even more substance painter and start slapping shit on until it eventually look nice. I'm not amazing at Substance but I am pretty happy with the results of it. They include emissions in within the components to make them glow under the full body suit to really add to the cybernetic look.

I'm not going to go into the Unity side of things due to me hating the Unity part with a passion but I hope this has been somewhat inciteful to the general process of this model and it's creation. I also hope it inspires you to go out of your comfort zone when creating models to learn new techniques and create some fucking amazing stuff. It takes time, effort and at points you'll want to pull your hair out but the overall experience is worth it and you'll gradually be able to make more advantageous models and assets.

For constant updates join my Discord server as it's by far the easiest place to see what I'm working out. Most of my projects I do not write up a blog for either. Link:  https://discord.gg/VTr29yR