Basemesh - Female

One of the ways we stayed on style across a growing team was to provide solid base meshes. Its a fine line to walk. You want to capture the essence of the style of the game WITHOUT putting too much character or personality in them. I think that was the hardest part for me, as I tend to naturally work intuitively (and yes as weird as it may sound, I DO talk to my characters while I work on them; I mean how else am I supposed to to figure out who they are 😅 )

To combat this, I decided to give layering in Zbrush a go. By offering combinations to the team, any artist, no matter their level of experience, could feel confident they were launching in the right direction. They could use (or not) these tools as much or as little as they felt comfortable.

In the end a base mesh is just that, a base. It is still up to the artist to give the final character its... well... character! Well, as we discovered, this tool proved to be super useful. Sometimes we just didn't have the time to fuss around, and some days we felt more capable than others; the important thing is we had a safety net, something that anchored us as a team, so that on days where we felt super inspired and confident we could venture forth fearlessly knowing we could always come back to the basics.