The Art of the Samurai Soldier Rig

Okay, so we’re back to the pre-production of Daughter of God, yay! Creating the final character rigs, ones that will be used in the final renders (of course we might do a few changes before the actual rendering begins… and word ‘final’ doesn’t mean final, here in AWF it’s never final… unless there’s blood involved ) Starting with a very simplified soldier rig which only has 3000 polygons, our aim is to have the rigs to be at least 9000 polygons. So I begin the process to up rez the rig, which means adding much more detail (polygons) to the mesh… becoming less squarish but still keeping that visual style like Arcade Trap

Our regular soldiers needed to look more like samurai warriors, even if they have futuristic-type armor. And no, it’s not based in the future, just think of it set back in the day when samurai’s used to exist… except they have guns, vehicles, explosives and of course bad-ass ninjas So using a lot of references from samurai movies, comics and google, we designed our soldiers to look more like old school warriors than something you’d see on Astro Boy, haha!

Like I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, our characters are only rigs, which means that there are separate meshes for each body limb. This makes it easier to work on when I can simply hide the rest of the body and only have the one limb visible. We favor using “Edit Poly” to up rez the mesh as it’s more accurate with polygon counts and has better tools to use. For example, the chest part of the soldier I use tools such as Cut (slice a polygon to any shape) and Connect (quick way to slice in between lines) to shape the armor so it looks like the character is wearing armor instead of being a part of it. Can’t wait to do the ninja’s

This rig will be the base reference for all our rigs to follow, apart from the main characters, as they’ll be getting a special treatment… with love With the regular soldier ready, I created two more different soldiers, a royal soldier that has gold type armor and a regular leader soldier who has two colored flags on his backpack, just like a samurai Of course we’ve made changes to each type so they look different.

Then we started on the Royal family, which consists of one king (two versions) three queens (lucky king) and five children (unlucky king). All have to be modeled to match the target polygon which is 9000, and each having their own distinctive look to them. We didn’t want to spend too much time with the royal family considering they don’t have much screen time in the movie but their roll is very important.

Oops, almost written an essay haha… Next blog entry I’ll talk a lot more about the royal family and the next stage of the rigs which is the skinning of the faces