LEVI DAVIS III
3D LIGHTING ARTIST
& MOTION GRAPHICS DESIGN
Character Mosaic
During my junior year of college, two of my professors, Mark Reisch and Atia Newman, conceived the idea of the Character Mosaic contest. This project was created to help promote diversity within the space of free 3D character rigs, citing the observations of myself and few other students of the lack of diversity in free character pre-rigs. Several students submitted designs and it came down to a final ten. My submitted design was named fourth place and I was to be a modeler and texture artist for project during my senior year.
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During this project, I was responsible for modeling the first character, Emerald, and surfacing the second, Omar.
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The project's website (currently under construction) can be found here:
The first character, Emerald, was designed by Alyssa Minko (https://www.alyssaminko.com/). Emerald, (or "Em") was to be a mixed race teenage girl. As such, Alyssa and I collaborated heavily in her creation. We strived to emphasize her physical traits so as to give an accurate portrayal of her features in 3D space, while still maintaining a somewhat whimsical element to appearance. I initially created a quick sculpted base mesh of Em's face, quad-drawing her face from there.
Alyssa's awesome character sheet for Em!
Prior to this project, I did not consider myself as much of a character modeler; I found myself seeking out a lot of help to create the proper topology for Em. At first, I especially struggled with getting her shoulder, pelvis and hair topology correct. But with the guidance of the Character Mosaic team, I was able to overcome these challenges and successfully create her character mesh. From there, Alyssa textured her and Samantha Ferrigno (https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-ferrigno-533a157a/) rigged her. This project was an excellent learning experience and definitely made me more comfortable with character topology.
Omar's mesh was a lot of fun to work with. Based on concept designs and research by Marcel Saleta, Omar was to be representative of the rural campesinos of Central America. After Alyssa modeled him, I went to work on his UV's and textured him in Substance Painter.
Marcel's original design for Omar.
Omar all UV'd and ready to go!
Making gratuitous use of layer masks and customized brushes, I experimented with bringing color temperatures in his face. I tried to minimally automate the character, only using generators for the slight grunge on his clothing and boots. I used as many photographs and Photoshop-created brushes as I could to bring life to his texture work!
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Progress images on Omar's textures.
To further accentuate his design, I sculpted a normal map for his hat in ZBrush. I also tried to make his roughness map as plausible as possible while still maintaining integrity to the original design. I kept the eye purposely simple, so as to keep him customizable to a degree. His face and shirt were the highest resolution textures, at 2K. Everything else was 1K or below.
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Omar was a great step in character surfacing for myself and I'm definitely proud of his result so far. After my surfacing, the character went on to Nick Love (nicholasjameslove.com) for rigging.
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