Reflection #3 - The Rebels

To recall: Having survived the crash, the game starts with Melina finding herself awakened on a beach of an island populated by the nomads who have taken part in a conspiracy that led to Melina and her brother's abduction. Now, she has to fight her way out of this island to get a better view of where she's at.

Stage 1: These nomads/rebels conventionally drew inspiration from pirate figures who thrive on cheap weaponry and clothing(at least at some level). I started out by defining different body structures to potentially have different enemy types but with a certain familiarity. 

To quickly alter base humanoid meshes to carve out features, one just has to effectively make use of the move brush.

The images above show the first enemy models. It took me some time to realize that the level of detail wasn't enough. 

Stage 2: I'm glad that I was able to develop further from a very primitive iteration on a base mesh. In order to keep pushing the detailing further, I was advised to draw inspiration from more references(particularly from 15th-century European sailors):

While exporting models out of Maya for unity, one has to make sure that they've turned the smoothing groups off(especially for low poly art). I wasted hours trying to find the cause as to why the meshes were coming out smoothened. 

After going back and forth from Zbrush to Maya, I was able to refine cluttered bits of cloth by deleting unnecessary pieces of mesh and introducing a pirate belt. The move brush helped me to have different body structures for more enemy types. The image below is one of the models that I like. This one was derived out of Melina's mesh(check it out in the previous Devlog devoted to her):

This image above shows the final enemy models inside unity ready to take on the protagonist.

With weapons(10/08):

More updates to come. Cheers!