3D Art Assignment 1: Pixel Art in Unreal

For this project I chose to do something a bit different and create the beheaded from Dead Cells as a 3D voxelized model.

To start off I needed to gather references for the model. Below is the same reference that the artists at Motion Twin used when creating the original model for the beheaded.

Next, I used the reference and created a blockout from which I would build the model off of.

Once that was done, I retopologized the model to make it easier to uv unwrap it for texture painting, and to create the clothes and extra details.

With the base mesh done, I could move on to texture painting

Finally, I created a geometry node setup with the help of Noa Baggs from Cohort 20 to convert the mesh into voxels. In essence, the setup takes the mesh, converts it into a volume, fills that volume with points that are weighted higher the closer to the edge of the mesh they are, then it instantiates a cube at each point, and finally, adds the material to each cube by sampling the color from the nearest face on the mesh.

All this results in the following!

The original idea for my submission was to rig and animate the model, however, I ran into issues with exporting to unreal caused by the number of voxels being dynamic. I hope to come back to this project and finish said node setup so that I may reuse it in future projects.

WIP Animation with Geometry Node Setup: