Odinson V.1 - XPS Version

Hello Patrons

Here I'd like to show you the newest member in the F0-Star's model collection: Thor Odinson from the Marvel's Avengers game. Since release of the game I really wanted to get my hands on this model since he's looking pretty good imo.

However working with the raw assests seemed to be a little bit more "problematic" than expected 😅.

First of all this guy has massive amount of bones in both his face and hair. Actually there are 400 bones for his hair, around 450 more with the body and head which gives us a total of 850 bones (not counting the second armature layer). That is just huge, I really wonder why it was necessary to gave him this horrendously amount of bones - even with mocap other (more complex) models have less bones than him but for some reason they made the model work in that way... 😵

And as a bonus: None of the bones were named in the right way, it was just a straight list with numbers starting with "bone_001" to bone_8**". Trying to figure out which bones are moving parts on his body was a real nightmare, I can tell ya I've spend days of sorting and renaming all of them.

Typing the word "Hair-Back_01" around 300 times can make you a little bit insane after a while...🤯

Another big deal was the texture layout. For some reason these Avengers models use a second UV layer which can give you troubles when mapping the textures on the model in a render engine. So I had to make sure that I combined some of the textures since my rendering solutions only support one UV layer which is a common standard. The same goes for XPS - XnaLara Posing Studio - the tool I use to make the poses for the character models.

Also none of the textures names tell you where you need to put them on the model, it almost seems like someone at CD had a bad day creating the character models for their game. 😂

Anyways, with all that being reconstructed and fixed I've ported the model and started to work on a nude base body for him. Using his official renders as a reference for his body type and shape, I've designed him a nude mesh which is pretty muscular and just as tall like he gets shown in the comics. To respect the games aesthetics' with the character design I tried my best to match the best out of both worlds. 

Here you can see a screenshot from the base mesh:

With an overall polycount of 235k tris (including the hair) he's an heavy hitter 😉

Small bonus: Each of these "lines" are bones - a point on the surface which moves a certain part of the character model. Now with the amount of bones shown here (they are on both sides) you can make your own judgement about it.

With the base mesh finally finished I was working on the textures. Creating/Editing textures is a part which I really enjoy since you can be very creative and add some extra detail on top of the already very high mesh quality. His face textures from the game comes in native 4K resolution including all maps like roughness, specular, diffuse and normals and boy I can tell you they look absolutely stunning! Trying to match these already high quality presets ain't easy but I did my best to create him fitting textures for the lower part of his body which can match the same look of his face.

Of course XPS can't really show you the impact and quality of these textures but that little preview up there gives you an idea in which direction the final product can look like once I have created materials for him in the render engine.

And with that said I'm gonna take a cut here and show you the next previews in an upcoming post since I don't want to spoil all your fun hehe.

Anyways I'm very happy to have this model in my collection now and I'm also glad to announce that I will work on some exclusive content with him for the upcoming month July.

Tell me your opinions in the comment section I'm interested what you think about this.

That's it for now, I wish everyone a nice day and stay healthy!

~F0