This past week I worked on UV Mapping every part of the leader character and started working on the fibermesh hair as well as looking in to texturing my characters with Substance. 

After getting critique from the thesis round-robin last week I have moved forward on my sculpts and further refined them to look as close as possible to the sketches done by illustrator Gladys Leung who I have been working with to better fit with the style I had imagined for my characters. You can find her other work at her website here. In the coming weeks I will be getting character turnarounds that better showcase my characters.

I have also added more backstory to my characters and decided to give them weapons to better distinguish them and give them a unique silhouette.

I did a quick sketch of my characters with their weapons to give myself an idea of what poses I may want my characters to be in. I will further refine the sketch and finalize the poses of the characters soon.

I have also worked on better nailing down the proportions of the characters before starting the fine detail sculpting on the leader. The leader has been retopologized and has simpler geometry on the clothing and I will work on the rest of the characters this week.

This week I will continue sculpting the characters and better refining the features of them to match them more closely to the sketches done by Gladys. I will also begin texturing them in Maya to get a sense of what they will look like before going into Substance.

Other critiques I received on the characters was to use Mixamo to quickly rig them and animate them as well as possibly changing the color schemes of the uniforms a bit to better tell them apart. It was suggested I look at Team Fortress 2 characters which have red in their clothing but all have their distinct uniforms.

I also have thought about putting the characters into Unreal Engine as I do want to have these characters as part of a future game. It was also suggested to me to have my characters in freeze frame poses like in this Cyberpunk 2077 trailer where the characters are frozen but the camera moves around them.

The final critiques were to better model the characters to the sketches with paying attention to straight lines and curves and to work on the backstories of the characters and the way to portray this information without stating it.

In the coming weeks I will continue working on my characters with modeling the clothing and making the hair. I also have an illustrator working on drawing up my characters. 

So the second semester has begun. Taking the critique that I received from the end of last semester I have fixed the proportions of my characters and begun to retopologize them with minimal geometry that will be under the clothing. 

This way I still get the look of real hair without taking up so much render time and it will give me the freedom to put these models into a game in the future.