I want to create a main character that the player is able to easily put themselves into the shoes of, a silent protaganist that becomes a vessle for the player to explore the environment.
To start off with I needed to decide what style the main character was going to be, due to the setting being low poly I wouldn't be able to use hyperrealistic and this also cut down the amount of resoures I had to work with as low poly characters are considered stylised.
A game that had a style I was interested in referencing was Your amazing T-Gotchi! a indie horror game, about taking care of an anime girl.
This game uses a more stylised low poly style that still looks appealing while maintaing the aesthetic, which I felt would be suitable for my game design. This also meant I would be able to have details within my designs but still keep things simple. This game was made by Garage Heathen, a indie developer.
I didn't want to directly copy the base design from Your Amazing T-Gotchi! I looked into stylised bases on open source 3D model sites and found this which I would be using a an reference for the base of my character, as I create however I will however add distinctions, to vary it from the base.
A big issue I had with my development was whether the character would have smooth or flat shading, the flat shading fit the low poly design better, but I was worried that the standard smooth shading would make my character for appealing. I talked with several people and most said they prefered the way the low poly looked. Moreover the hair took much much longer than it should of, creating hair in low poly is an obstacle I didnt think about and this cut my productivity in half, spending much much longer on just trying to get the hair to look right.
After completing the base and hair I moved onto the clothes, this was a speedy process and its mostly involved coping the specific part of the body increasing the size and adding solidify modifiers.
Feedback
I then moved onto texturing the face, I wanted to texture the whole body to create more designs but I decided against due to time constrates. A big problem with texturing on 3D models is that its hard to get an idea of how the features should be spread out, especially since the faces are angled and different sizes this lead to the features of the face looking off.
I used graphics gale for the design of the face since Im experienced with in and this meant its consumed less time, and it also helped with the pixel design. I also tried adding blush like suggested from Newt to make the face less pale, however its more obvious on the texture than on the model, most likely due to the lighting.
I then had to rig the model. I've model quite alot at this point, so I forgot to more detail and record this process in more depth, however the image to the left show off the character skeleton and how each bone affects the character.
I used IK bones to make the leg adjustment more easier but didnt want to fuss to much about the arms. Not creating finger bones really helped to save time with this process. However the hoodie, shirt and hair were extremely hard to weight paint, as the hair was seperate objects, covered by the hoodie and the shirt covered also, meant they kept affecting the arms.