Goals I reached with this prototype are:

-Create character concept art in a short amount of time that captured the essence of the character

-Model a character with cleaner topology that looks alive and organic

-Model natural-looking hair that has good flow

-Understand PBR textures

-Experiment and better understand the Shader Editor in Blender

-Render with Cycles using my computer's GPU in Blender

-Export the character FBX into Unity and render it with HDRP using a cubic Skybox

I chose to create a character that I normally wouldn't. I am more accustomed to female characters so this was very insightful for me to better understand the male anatomy. Jonah is an assassin that is quiet and focused most of the time. One often wonders of the sights he has seen behind his piercing blue eyes!

I learned how modeling a character by extruding each vertex and manually creating each polygon, especially in the face, was much simpler and faster that previous methods I've used. This ensures there is no texture stretching and the character looks much more organic. I enjoyed this part very much!

I used a free human anatomy reference image online to model against.

As I modeled different parts of his gear, I switched to the MatCap preview setting with the random option turned on so I could better differentiate between different objects in Blender.

I decided it was best to model Jonah with straight hair instead of curly, with bezier curves. Sometimes it's important to shrink the scope of a project a little bit to ensure the quality of the work is at its best and the deadline is feasible.

Learning to create hair with bezier curves opens a gateway to modeling hair that can be even more detailed and fluid in the future--like with Blender's Hair system.

I learned about PBR textures as well as using the Shader Editor in Blender to cultivate the most detail using high detail textures for different parts of his gear and skin.

The Leather and Metal textures are from polyhaven.com.

I created my own custom brush in Krita for his beard and painted it in texture paint mode in Blender.

Then, I rendered Jonah in Blender using the render engine Cycles which utilized my GPU.

I exported Jonah as an FBX to Unity and plugged in a HRDI as a cubic Skybox. Then, I experimented with the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to render Jonah in Unity.