Behind the Scenes: Wander – Shadow of the Colossus

INTRODUCTION

Hi there everybody! My identify is Elder Barreto, and I am from Brazil. Artwork has all the time been part of my life, and since my Dad is a conventional artist, a giant a part of my creative formation comes from him. I began studying Blender throughout quarantine as a method to distract and problem myself, watching tutorials on Youtube and attempting to create property for a small sport venture with my brother. Since then, I’ve devoted myself to honing my expertise as a 3D artist.

INSPIRATION

The venture was impressed by the PlayStation 2 traditional Shadow of the Colossus, a sport that stands out for its immersive environment. The sport includes a fantasy setting with gigantic colossi that have to be defeated by the protagonist, Wander. To seize the model and aesthetics of the sport, a number of visible references have been collected, equivalent to screenshots, idea artwork and fan arts. As well as, the sport was revisited to investigate design components equivalent to shapes, colours, textures, and lighting. From these references, I might visualize the best way I needed the mannequin to look.

I organized all of the references with a instrument referred to as PureRef.

SPECIFICATIONS

My pc {hardware} is as follows:

• RTX 3060 TI ASUS DUAL OC GDDR6X
• Ryzen 5-3600
• 2x8GB RAM HyperX Fury
• XPG Gammix M.2 SSD
• Wacom Intuos S

The software program I used was:

• Blender
• Adobe Substance Painter
• GIMP
• PureRef

MODELING

Beginning with Blender, I blocked the principle character by ranging from a sphere, utilizing Dyntopo to rapidly extrude and create the principle shapes. This instrument helps you to create natural shapes from a sphere by dynamically including or eradicating geometry.

After the principle sculpt was achieved, the mannequin needed to be reto-pologized as a way to be rigged and UV-unwrapped. I used an addon to hurry up the retopology half referred to as Quadremesher, which supplies a fairly respectable topology consequence with one click on.

With primary poly modeling, I created the belts, sandals, sword, and case.

RIGGING

As soon as the principle items have been achieved, It was time to rig the character.

The pose comes from an occasion of the sport itself, the place the protagonist stands within the presence of a risk.

MULTIRES MODIFIER

With the multires modifier, you may create layers of subdivisions to sculpt tremendous particulars that the bottom mesh would not will let you. This helped me create folds and high-resolution particulars all through the mannequin, together with the sword and belt runes, pores and skin pores, and fabric folds.

It additionally lets you bake all these additional layers of subdivisions into a standard or displacement map, conserving all the small print and making the scene a lot lighter.

The bottom adopted the identical workflow: sculpting the bottom mesh, retopologizing, including a multires modifier to sculpt tremendous particulars, after which baking all of it to a standard map.

CLOTH SIMULATION

I used wind physics to simulate the cape’s motion, pinned the highest vertices, and added a weight paint to the underside the place I needed the wind to have extra impact.

TEXTURING

I used Substance Painter to create PBR textures for the mannequin and base, following a workflow based mostly on layers and masks. I began with good supplies that already had real looking bodily properties, after which added hand-painted variations to customise their look.

I additionally used some Substance Painter options like anchor factors to create dynamic results between layers, equivalent to put on, dust, and scratches.

I exported the textures in separate maps for every channel (base shade, roughness, metallic, regular, and many others.) and utilized them in Blender utilizing the principled shader BSDF.