Here's a process timelapse video I made of my first ever character creation - the Golden Gorilla. This was a task I was asked to make for my interview for my role as a Senior Motion Designer at One Agency, where they asked me to make a Golden Gorilla Character for the company Slots LV. It had to be created from scratch - so 3D modelled, sculpted, retopologized, UV unwrapped, texture painted, rigged and animated - pretty much all of this was new territory for me with regards to a full humainoid character. I had 1 week.
So I spent the entire week studying on YouTube, modelling characters, how to do correct topology, how to sculpt I high detailed model onto a low poly mesh, how to UV unwrap correctly, UDIM tiles, texture painting and baking textures, and I also had paid for a course in advanced rigging for animation so I had just started following that but with my character.
The results: I really enjoyed it! I had a lot of fun sculpting and learned that is possibly one of my favorite things to do. The rest of it was interesting but sometimes quite tedious but after a few months learned that there are more effective tools and addons that can expedite the process in a much more efficient way. I ended up rigging the character bone by bone but ended up uploading my character to Mixamo anyway and getting a premade dancing animation as after the process of creating the character took a few days with it being so new to me, animation just felt out of the question, so doing it this way was necessary in order to get it out of the door and delivered on time.
In addition to this, I also did lots of research into Hollywood level CG gorillas, including King Kong and Mighty Joe Young to try and get an understanding of how many artists worked on the creature creation and how long it took and how much it cost, in order to try and put things into perspective for myself and my potential new employers. It turns out it took several million dollars, several years and teams of veteran technical artists to create these stunning characters. So it really helped to do this research to show what little old me, on my own, with no budget and 1 week could achieve. And to be fair they were blown away with the results and the work I had put in and offered me the job instantly.
