Week 43 - Kotallo Headdress, Horizon Forbidden West Fan Art - Blockout

 Milestone 01 Check In: Blockout

Im going to say straight up I hate how this is coming out; however, due to more personal life problems, this is the best I could manage for this week.

Schedule

[06/16] BLOCKOUT [] -- First pass of everything; establish the form and sizing for all objects

[06/23] REFINEMENT & HAIR CARDS [] -- Refining the hardsurface and rope designs into a highpoly, create a first pass of the larger plume/hair cards

[06/30] RETOPO & UVS [] -- Retopology, uvs and a secondary hair pass

[07/07] TEXTURING & RENDERING []  -- Use generator and mask-based texturing workflows Render in Marmoset Toolbag.

Tools used: Maya (Ahoge & GS Curves plugin), Substance Painter, Fiber Shop, Unreal Engine

 References

For this project, since I escaped the soft fleshy bits of character sculpting, a lot of my references are just trying to understand the shape language that Horizon Forbidden West uses for their warriors, in this case the Tenakth Marshalls.

(I dont have the images at the time of writing this blog post but I also had both the Horizon Forbidden West and Zero Dawn art books physically infront of me that I was referencing; I will add them ASAP.)

Clean versus annotated breakdown

I was able to find a free model of Aloy in one of the Tenakth armor sets to break apart and see how they do everything, however I will mention it is the wrong clan since the designers of this game are incredibly cool and made each subsect of the Tenakth -- Desert, Sky, and Lowland -- all have different designs in their specific armor types

This is the Aloy Tenakth Recon Outfit, extracted by Tosyk, my third favourite set in the game. There is a pretty important note that "if I have this model, surely someone must have extracted Kotallo's model, especially since he's one of the most beloved characters in this specific game." I thought so too; it turns out extracting models from HFW is incredibly difficult.

One aspect I immediately learned from this model is that there's actually an entire texture map that is just an atlas of rope. That is so incredibly cool and isn't appreciated enough. I also stole Aloys' face for a mannequin to make sure proportions are correct.

Also, Aloy has baby hairs on her face. I love these artists so much.

 Back on topic, working on this project is something I've wanted to do for an extremely long time. I played HFW right when I got into the major, and every couple of years I end up right back at it's development process. In 2022, when I got my Blizzard scholarship and got access to the GDC Vault I watched the Guerrilla Games presentations over and over and over again. Specifically these three come to mind a lot while working on this project.

Although im not happy with the general blockout, I am really excited on the experimentation for the hair cards. In Common Art I've gotten the opportunity to work with and learn new workflows for creating afro-textured hair for one of our main characters. I believe I can apply some of the same logic to here. Although this is most likely just utilizing curves rather than the volume-to-curve pipeline we're using in CA

CA pipeline uses a volume -> proxy hair cards or mesh -> curves -> final cards pipline which allows us to keep everything editable while visualising the end product.

For Kotallo's headpiece it would likely just be focusing on the curves