Ugly Joe, Old Boxer

Ugly Joe is a battle-worn boxer whose spirit refuses to age even as his body betrays him. Once a feared contender, he fights with the same grit and ferocity, but the years of punishment have taken their toll. Ugly Joe always comes back for another fight; the ring is his home, and retirement is not in his vocabulary.

This project started out of my desire to improve on my anatomy. A boxer just has his boxer and gloves, leaving very little room for errors in the anatomy. Another goal for this project was to create a game-ready character model. I learned a lot throughout the making of this and used this model as a template for learning how to properly optimize models for in-game use and for 3D printing.

Much of the work was done inside of ZBrush following a standard game production pipeline of creating the high poly mesh, retopology/UV mapping inside of Maya, texture baking, texturing in Substance, and testing it out inside of Unity. Trying to keep it as light as possible to not cause any issues in performance was the key to this project.

I originally created this character as part of my portfolio. This got me noticed by the creator of the game The Thrill of the Fight, Ian Fitz, who got in contact with me, and we collaborated on doing the rest of the characters for the first game. It’s a VR boxing game, so the characters needed to be fairly optimized. There was a great back and forth on what needed to be cut down from the models and what could stay in.

I used this model in my early days getting into 3D printing. It’s always awesome to see what you’ve worked on digitally be brought so accurately into the physical world. I learned how to use a resin 3D printer, which can be more accurate and precise in the detail but prints in a smaller space.