Creating the Cute Protagonist for Our Game

For our game Not so Trash Panda, you play as a mischevious raccoon running around a neighborhood completing tasks. I was in charge of creating our playable character. I'll take you through my process from concept, to sculpt, to animation. 

Concept

Before jumping into making a 3D version of our raccoon character, I started by drawing up some concept art. While designing him, I tried to find a balance between stylization and realism to match our game. 

Sculpt

After creating the concept, the next step in my process was to sculpt the raccoon in ZBrush. The biggest challenge of this for me was getting accurate proportions. I started out by only referencing my concept art, but I quickly learned that I would not be able to make a believable raccoon this way. I got better results after using reference images of real raccoons. 

Block out

Final sculpt

Retopology

Once I was satisfied with my sculpt, I sent it to Maya to begin retopology. I used quad draw to create a low poly version of the raccoon by drawing quads over the high poly. 

Texture

I brought the low poly model into Substance Painter for texturing, and did a high-to-low poly bake with the sculpt from ZBrush. I then hand painted the pattern on from the concept art.

Animation

After texturing was complete, I brought the model into Blender for rigging. I used Blender's Rigify add on to create the rig, and after some minor adjustments I took it into Maya for animation. The most challenging part of animating was creating fluid and believable movement. I looked at raccoon videos and other animations for reference to understand how they walk, run, and interact with the environment. 

Walk

Run

Idle

Thank you for taking the time to read about my character process. We hope you get a chance to play our game, and run around as a little guy.