Mikael Character Mesh - Development

Welcome to my third blog post, this time I will be going through subtly the concept behind my character Mikael, inspirations that came from developing him and also the development phase and how I 3D Modelled him.

Mikael, being one of the three Ascended Angels that serve the Goddess. The three haven't been seen since the Great Seclusion. Mikael seeks Stella within the Purgatory World, as she's the one who will redeem the world with her Mark.

Mikael, along with the rest of the Ascended, appear cybernetically modified as evidenced by their silver, metallic skin. He wears golden/silver metallic armour and has eyes emitting radiant light. He also has enormous silver wings, similar to the other Ascended beings. He abides his entire existence to serve the Goddess, however he believes the merge with Mechatronic energy that have been bestowed upon the Ascended would result in the unavoidable corruption of the Divine Order.

My influences in creating Mikael were mostly through the series 'Shin Megami Tensei's' Archangel characters.

The influences are quite obvious, the angelic features and aesthetics from Shin Megami Tensei were very inspirational when creating Mikael, as I generally love the almighty appearance of these characters.

The particular archangel that affected the design of Mikael the most was Metatron (Right image).

Now, for the mesh creation, I created the character on 3DS Max and textured it within Substance Painter. I initially started this character off first before Stella, so there was a lot of changes that occured throughout the process. I'll try to keep everything very condensed in this blog process, so please enjoy!

Starting the character off, I decided to start from the legs up to the head through the early phase. This was my first time trying to get body proportions right, so I focused mainly on the kneecaps and chest for that. It came with a trade off though, as I had used too many unnecessary polygons to make the form.

Also, I didn't use Box instance Symmetry during this phase (silly me) and when I tried to use the Symmetry modifier to make my life slightly easier, the mesh would end up looking odd and not what I wanted it too look like, especially around the waist, belt and the Kilt.

The hair and face, on the other hand, where started off from box instances so I had no major problem with it. The face was interesting to make, as Mikael's eyebrow area overshadows his eye region, creating a shadow underneath the eyes. The hair was also quite fun to make, as the shape was quite curved around the edges.

I started to add in a little more detail, such as giving definition to the lower eyelids and dropping the bottom lip slightly. Below is a wireframe of the mesh at that current state.

The main goal was to get the face looking quite detailed and not too low poly, while also making sure no stretched geometry, such as the one two images up on the forehead, is visible.

A problem that I faced while creating it on this state was trying to keep the heavily edged eyelid topology on a low by not continuing the edges onward towards the forehead. This would later be solved though.

As mentioned before, I began to revitalise the mesh and start some aspects again, mainly the body and clothing. I also revamped the face a little more to get an aggressive look that I could work with, in order to bring the facial details on the desired level I was striving for. This is demonstrated in the two left images below.

Completely remade the body, which was continuously extruded from the neck of the previous head model.

I prioritised making the face become rounder and more characterised than before. Skin material was also redone to make it look more brighter and reflective.

I also started to add the Eyeliner that Mikael has in the concept, which was simply done by grabbing one of the edge loops closest to the eyeball and adding a dark material onto it.

At this stage, I was trying to make the Wings and the Feathers. I had to look at various references and videos in order to create the feathers, from both Google and YouTube. The wings were made without much problems, but it looked a little uneven so I had to use NURMS which allowed me to control the refinement level of it, including the subdivision, which was kept to a minimum.

Here I used Stella's mesh for perspective work on what size Mikael is. Initially, I wanted him to tower regular human size, so around three times the size of Stella. But I reduced it, to match with the concept more.

I experimented with the feathers some more, by adding a singular mesh created by splines instead of multiple, individual feather meshes. The idea was that I'd have one mesh which would reduce the polygon count, and also would later be textured to resemble the feathers more. Below you can see the wireframe of both of my wings during the experimental phase.

As the mesh was starting to look fairly fleshed out, I dropped it into Mixamo to test out animations and to see if there would be any irregularities. On export, some materials didn't carry over as I had used Raycasting Materials for the eyes and skin.

As I was testing the mesh on Mixamo, I found one problem which was the neck proportion of the character. It seemed very long and narrow, so I decided to address the problem by fixing it in 3DS Max. The results are shown below, where it looks much better than before. The wings itself on the screenshot looked deformed because it was automatically rigged with the character, as Mixamo doesn't necessarily support a wing rig, so this wouldn't be apparent in the final version.

I was starting to finalise the face by giving the facial details some definition and keeping as close to the concept art that I created as possible. I unfortunately struggled to keep the hair more thicker due to time constraints, but I still was proud of the current results.

This was the current mesh topology, which was quite low on the current state.

I remade the wings again, by studying closely at an existing 3D character mesh of 'Metatron' in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. The wings are very angular, as you can see from the image so I still made the wings from splines, just this time it was individual feathers like before, but essentially flat planes.

After this, I went on to test Rig parts of the character out myself in 3DS Max. I also Unwrapped the UVW, so I could get ready to texture on Substance Painter.

The image above displays the final mesh for the character.

While importing the character onto Substance Painter, there was a problem where part of the Left Wing's faces would disappear. This was because of the transformation axis not being on 100% while exporting, so I had to go back into 3DS Max and fix it.

While texturing, I created several unique channels such as Emission for the eyes (demonstrated in the 2nd image), Opacity for the Hair and also Height Map for several Alpha Layers. The black/white Alpha image (shown below) was made on Inkscape by myself and was imprinted onto the chest of Mikael in Substance. It was fairly amazing to see it on the character, although I had a couple of quality size problems with it at first.

The Hair texture was my proudest part of it, as the strands looked very unique throughout the entire hair mesh and overall showed some good results.

The images above showcase the final version of my project, where more further details where added onto the face such as skin height maps, rings around the armbands and dirt detail on the boots. Overall, I learnt so much during this entire process of creating Mikael. There could have been a lot more applied, now that I look back onto it, but nevertheless I enjoyed making this for my Uni Project.

I hope you have enjoyed reading my process of creating Mikael, stay tuned for more character process content on my website! ;)

#3dCharacterprocess #3DSMax #ShinMegamiTensei #Mikael #Lowpoly #SubstancePainter