Phantom Culprit: Character Creation

Tools

To create my characters I used a mix of Adobe Fuse, Substance Painter and Maya. Each tool respectively allows me to create their models, textures and animation.

Adobe Fuse

Adobe Fuse is a free character mesh builder that allows for users to start off with a basic array of body parts. These can then be edited with finer precision and then equipped with clothes and accessories.  Adobe Fuse also rigs the characters with a skeleton which can then be used for animations. Rigged meshes can be exported to Adobe Mixamo for some quick, pre-made animations which I used for my characters walking and zombie attack animations.

My main character in Adobe Fuse.

Substance Painter

Substance painter, a material editor as mentioned in the previous post, allows me to add finer details to my characters and meshes. I used it to add more gore to my zombies but to also create high quality textures for a few props such as the ammo boxes which can be found in the game.

The handgun ammo box in Substance Painter.

The materials in Substance Painter were exported with diffuse, height. metallic, normal and roughness maps. All which are used in the Unreal Engine materials to create amazing looking materials. The vending machine prop I created was also given an emissive map to give the surrounding area the glow off the front of the machine.

Maya

Maya, used for creating all my meshes, was also used to edit my Fuse characters and their skeletons to fix any auto rigging bugs and change parts I didn't like. I also used it to create animations for my character and weapons.

My character in Maya, untextured view.

I split my player character model into two parts to create an immersive first person view. One part being the body without arms and then the arms themselves. This allowed me to freely animate the arms for my weapons without having to worry about blending animations with the movement animations.
The body without arms.
The arms with no body, wireframe view so the skeleton can be seen underneath.


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