I chose to create a modern day jungle explorer basically because I just finished reading the Lost City of Z: A Tale of Obsession in the Amazon and am fascinated by people who explore remote jungles.
My Process:
I started by gathering references of past famous explorers so I could develop a list of characteristics that should be incorporated into the character. I did note many seemed to show an interest in exploration at an early age - so I decided the create the character at different stages of life.
I created the explorer using Character Creator 4. I started with a basic male and used the morph sliders to come up with the final. From there I used the Skin Gen tools to add detail like the tattoos and sweat. I exported an image to Photoshop to create the face tattoo and normal, and modified the tribal arm tattoo that comes with Skin Gen to make the leg tattoo.
In Blender I put together all of the poses and made the majority of the clothes with a Blender add-on called Divine Cloth. It makes cloth simulations easy to do. For the scarf, it is a cloth simulation and I added a world map as the texture. I also used some clothes, boots, hair and facial hair that came with CC4.
I had started testing the poses with some of the standard ones that come with CC4 but chose not to use them. I used an iPad app to help create the poses. It was important to finalize all the poses since the clothing simulations are dependent on the final poses. For the facial expression I used the Rigify rig and the shape keys that come into Blender as a result of the CC4 pipeline add on. I had also tested various expression in iClone using the Face Key tool to get an idea of what I wanted in the final images.
I created some of the accessories in Blender but downloaded some from Sketchfab (the Crocodile by Hallow; the Backpack by Rigdhi; the Rope Bundle by Asif Janjua; GPS byMikhail Antonov - links are in the turntable video description)
