Portfolio Piece 01 - Week 01

Time to start the Summer semester off with the first assignment of 3D Art III. We are now spending class time to create personal portfolio pieces uniquely tailored to our interests and what we want to do. After picking out some choices and getting feedback from Nick Zuccerello, our teacher, I landed on creating a League of Legends fan skin with WINTER WONDER AMUMU:

Main concept art by Noah Warner

Additional references

I am a big fan of Riot Game's League of Legends and in my opinion, they have fine tuned their hand painted art assets to be a staple of the franchise no matter which game in the in-game universe. From what use to be low-poly low res art has become one with more of a style with a personal touch. I was browsing through Google and Artstation and came about this fan concept of Amumu, a champion from the game. Personally I don't play the champion much, but I have always enjoyed the whimsical sad vibes of the character that it has become synonymous for. However, the champion is outdated when it comes to his model, animations, and VFX. One way a champion is able to have some changes is through skins and I feel in this case, even though Amumu has a Christmas theme skin, this one gives him a Cuphead feel while incorporating elements of the holidays. His signature sad face is still present and is a ironic contrast to he warmth and celebratory nature of Christmas.

Since everyone has different projects, we need to have a custom plan of attack to have a finished product in four weeks time. At the moment, we are at week 1, but time is money and we need to get working in order to make best use of time to create a well polished project by the end.

Here is my plan of attack:

Week 1: Block out to high res sculpt
Week 2: Game res/UV, begin texturing (AO/gradients/base color)
Week 3: Texturing and polish, start rigging
Week 4: Posing, final display of work

When it comes to displaying the work, I want to follow more of what I have been seeing when it comes to displaying work for League of Legends. In the case of the characters, there is a big emphasis of having the character be shown on the game's Summoner's Rift map. The reasoning being, is because it's important to get a sense of scale of how the character fits into the game as well with it's surroundings and other champions/assets. I want to also be able to display the champion posed to with effects drawn in to help visualize the skin in action with it's own abilities with the Winter holiday twist. A big inspiration when it comes to the display of the work will come from Yekaterina Bourykina, who happens to also have made my favorite skin in the game: Spirit Blossom Ahri.

Week 1 Progress Check:

Even though we are free to set our own pace and schedule for this piece during the allotted time frame, I was very eager to get started with it as a dream company of mine is Riot Games and I want to create art of League of Legends. To start, I began with a simple blockout inside of Zbrush:

Zbrush Blockout

Following that, I began to sculpt in more of the shape of the head as it is the signature part of the skin as well the character. It was important for me to make sure to have Amumu's sad boy face showing on the piece. Looking at Amumu's base official model. Riot didn't put enough emphasis on that aspect, and as such I feel skin's should compensate for that and show Amumu's true spirit. Following that, I sculpted on the lower half with the main body, slippers, and hands:

Zbrush Sculpt as of Week 1

When it comes to my week 1 progress, I am pretty satisfied, although I slightly missed the mark by not have the Christmas lights sculpted in. As I only spent the weekend working on it, it is evident if I spend weekdays as well, I can easily make my plan. For the following week, in addition to what I need to accomplish for week 2, I need to polish to my Zbrush sculpt and add in the Christmas lights. As a side note: I did a rough paintover to help me better understand how to have the lights wrap around Amumu as the concept art boggled my mind and felt weird:

Front and back of the block out to help me better visualize the lights