Project Cartoon Rat

Hmmh... I've been quiet for quite a while it seems. But surprisingly I haven't been sitting around doing nothing. Instead I started a new character project. This was inspired by Everquest Next. I wanted to see how the ratonga would look in the new game, but they didn't show anything of them so eventually, one evening I opened Photoshop and quickly (well, it  took longer than I want to admit) drew the image on the left in the pic down there \/

How rats are made.

Next I messed around in Zbrush and managed to build something that looked good enough in my opinion. (At least if considering the quality of my concept "art") I did retopoing in Blender and then threw the model back to Zbrush to sculpt some details and to create simple diffuse map. I decided to keep the model quite simple texture-wise, though I may add some more details later. Or try to add 3d fur. Or something.

Anyway, I didn't want to have a naked rat running around so I designed some clothes for him. Or armor to be exact.

Rat's armor progress

After that I started baking textures furiously. Some bakes were less than successful and some were horrible. But some were good enough after some photoshopping and I finally got all textures baked.

All maps are 2048x2048.

So after slamming all this together, here is the outcome:

Should I censor the ones on the right?

But characters without rigs aren't very interesting, so I decided to build a rig too.

Some bones are for armor parts.

So there it is. I also build a simple face rig for him. He wasn't very happy about it, though.

Best moment when building a face rig is when you get it finished and get to try it out. :)

He was a bit happier in his test pose.

Whee!

So, now I only have to make some animations with him. We'll see when I find time for that.

I also modeled him a sword. I hope he doesn't hurt himself with it.

He felt insecure so I had to give him one of these. There's room for a scabbard on the sword's uv layout. Maybe I get that done too, eventually. :)