3 dimensions- what a time to be alive!

For this post I'm going to explain my approach to the 3D character and share some references with you.

For this model I'm trying to create something bespoke but naturally sometimes even the best artists need a starting point. first of all I made a list of everything I wanted the character to be:

- Stoic.
- Conventionally handsome/beautiful/aesthetically pleasing.
- Futuristic/ Cyberpunk inspired (genre not game)
- Detective/ police.

I then tried to list all the characters I thought could embody that- I could retro-fit the futuristic side of things later and I came up with a list of characters:

- Luther (Idris Elba, Luther, BBC)
- Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter, Netflix)
- Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman - Altered Carbon, Netflix)
- Adam Jensen (Deus Ex Human Revolution, Square-Enix)


These are just a couple off the list, for the sake of brevity I won't replicate the whole thing here, but should give you an indication of the sort of character I'm aiming to complete.

Next up it was time to look at clothing, I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to take this in initially.

Let's make some progress!

First I need to make a basic human mesh to follow- this tutorial above by James Taylor is fantastic- he has guides from body modeling to face modeling then sculpting & texturing to get a final result. He also has some fantastic reference images available. 

Some early progress- I scrapped this attempt to more closely follow James' tutorial

So far the modeling process has been tough, I've been trying to create the best topology I can to make sure that down the line I don't encounter issues with rigging and animation. 

The process is tricky and while the tutorial is twenty minutes- I've easily spent four to five hours following it just trying to get the model to both mirror James' topology and the reference image. It has certainly taught me at my stage the importance of reference imagery.