This is Björn. Björn has been stuck in my head for a pretty long time now. It was about time for him to get out there to strech his legs!
When it comes to Björn, I’m the one who made everything! From making the concept art to the modeling, rigging, animating and implementing. That was all me! I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to show some of my process off!
Designing Björn wasn’t especially difficult. His initial design stemmed from a character illustration I created a couple of years ago, featuring a random Viking battling a sea monster.
When I was working on one of my own stories, I thought it would be fun to add a Viking character. I love reusing old designs, so Björn made a return as the right-hand man of another character.
I’m not entirely sure why I chose Björn to be turned into a 3D model. He’s not the main character in my story, but there’s something about the sadness in his eyes that really spoke to me I guess.
To make the model easier to work with, I had to tweak some elements of his design. The biggest change was his leather skirt. While it wasn’t impossible to work with, I’d never rigged free-flowing cloth before. To keep the project on track and finish the rig in a timely manner, I had to drop the skirt. I made a few other adjustments too, but I don’t think you want to hear me ramble on about character design!
I had never used ZBrush before starting my education at The Game Assembly. ZBrush was honestly a lot easier than I thought it would be. Not that its a simple program! But I think my art background and time spent on classical art and croquis. It really helped me understand the 3d shapes infront of me.
So the 3d modeling of Björn was honestly one of the easiest part of the pipeline for me!
And onto the rigging!
From a first glance you’d think Björns rig would be a pretty standard humanoid rig. And that’s true for the most part. There is one major difference that changed the rigging process a fair bit.
Björn is really cartoony. I wanted to keep my art style with him when I modeled him. this makes him so his eyes are flat. So instead of the eyeball moving, its instead the pupil that does all the moving. His eyelids are also a seperate mesh which isn’t really the norm when rigging eyes.
He has FK to IK arm and leg switches!
He has some other smaller features as well. But I don’t want to write a novel here! Its time to show his unreal moveset!
Unreal moveset!
Unreal is a program that I haven’t had much time to work in yet. But its a program I would love to spend more time in and get better at!
I’ve had to watch a whole bunch of tutorials and pester my poor classmates with questions. But I’m really happy with the end result!
I’m looking forward to learning more about this program in the future! I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with this one!
Björns statemachine! He can technically jump. But I never polished any of the jump animations since I wanted to put my all into his more interesting features.
This is the blueprint for Björns axe throw as well as the axe return.