Game Art - Final Project: Art Bible
20/12/2024 - 8/1/2025
Week 9 - Week 15
Ng Jia Ern 0363033
Game
Art
Final Project: Art Bible
INSTRUCTIONS
Art Bible:
Initial Concept
Initially, I wanted to create a cyberpunk-style game, but as I started sketching and doing research, I realized that my knowledge of cyberpunk and mecha was too limited. It was hard for me to understand how these elements were designed or conceptualized, so I eventually gave up on that idea. Instead, I turned my focus to a game I’ve been playing recently, Zenless Zone Zero. It’s a modern open-world game with character and monster designs from various factions. I really love the game’s style—it’s trendy and fresh.
Final Direction
So, I decided to proceed with this idea. I plan to create a new faction for the game, designing characters to enrich its roster. To make it less challenging for myself, I chose to stick to a style I enjoy: a cute, anime-inspired design. For my character designs, I chose a bakery theme, with each character inspired by a specific cake flavor. Since the weapons in Zenless Zone Zero are quite creative—like scissors, folding suitcase cannons, chainsaws, flamethrowers, and drills—I wanted to design equally imaginative weapons for my characters. Staying true to the bakery theme, I came up with weapons like a frosting cannon, a whisk gun, and a fork staff. Among the three character sketches I created, I chose MeiMei to refine further. Her attack method involves shooting cream that can blind enemies and cause negative effects. Her cream cannon is much larger than her petite frame, creating a cute and humorous contrast.
Challenges in Character Design
The biggest challenge for me in this project was anatomy. I struggle with drawing dynamic poses, so when the character’s body twists, I often find it difficult to understand and draw accurately. To tackle this, I used the Magic Poser website as a reference, setting up the poses before drawing them. Weapon design was also a bit challenging because it was hard for me to imagine the mechanics and concepts behind guns and cannons. To overcome this, I looked at many references on Pinterest before creating my designs.
Modeling Process
For character modeling, it’s not particularly difficult, just tedious. Since I worked on anatomy modeling in ZBrush last semester, I’ve become quite comfortable with the software. I directly modified my previous human model into a chibi-sized proportion, which saved me a lot of time when building the body and clothes. However, after modeling, there’s still a long process ahead: retopology, UV unwrapping, baking maps, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, and engine testing. A single semester isn’t enough to finish all that—there’s just not enough time!
Time Constraints and Workflow Adjustments
I did my best, but I couldn’t manually retopologize, so I used ZBrush’s ZRemesher to reduce the poly count, then imported the model into Blender and applied smooth shading to make it look cleaner. After that, I imported it into Substance Painter for texturing. The remaining steps I couldn’t complete due to time constraints—I’ll probably learn them during the semester break. At least now I know the direction I need to take.
Challenges During ZRemesher
One issue with reducing poly count directly in ZBrush is the loss of detail. For example, the decorative elements on my character’s hat were part of the same model and not separated, so the small flower’s texture became difficult to paint. I ended up skipping it. Similarly, the lace on the skirt didn’t align well with the skirt itself, so I manually adjusted it in Blender.
Texturing in Substance Painter
While working on textures in Substance Painter, I encountered a problem with layer organization. I hadn’t named the layers or merged materials of the same type, which resulted in too many layers and made the texturing process quite messy. I went back to ZBrush, renamed each material on the model, and then returned to Substance Painter to continue. Thankfully, Substance Painter is quite beginner-friendly—I managed to grasp it in just one day. Here’s some helpful tutorials I found:
Advantages of Substance Painter
I realized that Substance Painter makes texturing incredibly efficient and quick. Compared to Blender or Unreal, where you have to adjust properties like metallic, roughness, pattern, and alpha layer by layer, in SP, you can simply apply a similar material, tweak the colors and details slightly, and you’re good to go. It’s unbelievably convenient. The built-in render presets in SP are also great—just pick a preset and render. The only downside is that it’s GPU-intensive (my PC’s fans were going wild during rendering—it felt like a storm was brewing). Unfortunately, SP doesn’t support turntable rendering, but it seems that Adobe Substance 3D Stager can handle animations. I haven’t had the chance to explore that yet, so I’ll leave it for later when I have more time.
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