Hair 1-4 The tribe model will be using the same body but different hairstyles to differentiate between multiple people. This can allow us to quickly populate the world without spending a long time on creating unique models. I created 4 different hairstyles for this. To create the hair I used a bezier curve to make individual strands which is placed around the head.
Full model The rest of the model I made using a cube as a base, which I then shaped into the desired body parts. The hands, shoes and torso were created this way, with the legs extended from the shoes and connected to the top. The same process applies to the arms, which were made from the torso and connected to the head to form the neck. The skirt was created with a circle extruded into the correct size and a slit cut into one of the ends. To create a smooth draping of the fabric, I used cloth physics. The belt was made by extruding from the waist and then inflating it in sculpting.
Texture Painting
To prepare the model for texture painting, I applied all the modifiers, converted the hair into a mesh and marked the seams in the topology to create a UV map. I tackled the easiest parts of the model first. The body and face were filled with a flat colour based off my reference. The model will consist of flat colours, and the shaders in Unity will help with the shading. To make the model more alive, I did add some rose blushes and shading. For the hair, I had to check if they contain a reasonable amount of faces to ensure the performance will not be impacted too much. The hairs 1-3 were all relatively low, but the 4th hair featured way more faces due to the complexity. I decided here that I would only use hair 2 and 4, as I wasn't satisfied with its result. To reduce the faces, I deleted the areas that won't be visible to players. The right is the final model with its textures, and additionally, I created two different shoe styles.
Rigging and Weight painting For the rigging, I used Rigify to import a human armature. This will help me expedite the process when it comes to doing IKs. I learnt to use Rigify for rigging and weight painting with help from my sources.
Face presets To animate the blinking on the face, I used shape keys to make the process easier to achieve, and it will be easy to use when animating. The blinking on the eyes is separated into 2 different shape keys, which would give me the flexibility to create different face expressions. Although the face expressions that we currently need in the game are not complex and dialogue is not implemented yet, I still created shape keys for some mouth movements.
Left Eye
Right Eye
Mouth Close
Mouth Open
