Strings — The Quintet

More of the art for that game, which was inspired by a lucid nightmare. I needed to round out the idea, and came up with five people who wouldn't mind leaving Earth behind for good. MB Lab is an excellent add-on for establishing basic human anatomy, or acquiring acceptable bases for clothing meshes; but a great deal of additional work needed to be done, particularly regarding hair (which I humbly admit I'm still not perfectly crazy about). I may revisit any one of them. Additionally, the one other humanoid character I need to model — a self-supporting and evolving AI — will deviate enough from a normal human that I'm not entirely sure I even can start with an MB Lab mannequin; but we'll see what happens.

Clothing, which can be viewed in full in the 1080hd YouTube video, was wholly original. I took influences from Parkour clothing for the shoes, and was inspired for the gloves by a typing glove I saw once. The characters' ages range from thirty to eighty, but canonically they've cross-trained for a couple of years and any one of them might need to scramble at any moment. The color coding wasn't strictly necessary, but I feel it might be useful in gameplay for identifying the player character. You know, one of those things that everybody needs to know but not everyone thinks about when it's clear. One of the most important lessons for me on that was just how spectacularly different male and female anatomy is—I actually had to literally design the gloves twice; as they couldn't be readily remapped from Leinman to Walz or Perez. I had similar trouble with the shoes, though it wasn't as significant. Good thing I *mostly* know what I'm doing.

I had to deal with quite a bit of conflicting geometry and manifolds when working with clothing this complicated. Walz had all sorts of problems with her initial model; Hansel still has a massive geometric red flag but it's my hope that no one will notice. If someone calls me out on it I'll have to touch it up. Oooh, and also Leinman has a serious non-manifold issue in his left glove, but don't tell anyone!

There will be a few more additions to this set with time, such as a photo I'm working on which should show them all sitting at a table together before hitting interstellar space. Perhaps, I'll have them toast the camera. As much as I appreciate Mixamo as a concept, it has a tendency to mangle fine digits of character models; which will often present me with an unusable animation, at least not without significant time spent cleaning it up. It would be nice if they would allow for a limited subset of their skeleton, or a bone remapping. So, I'll more likely be matching the armature to a video reference and tweaking it as I see fit.

I wanted something that not only had remnants of the thousand-year cryofreeze, but also was suited to survival in an unknown environment; which will be a recurring theme here. Each of these characters has a developing story and may be subject to some editing with time.