Joanna Dark (Zero)

(Not official)

"2020. Corporations control everything. With one Exception."

Well it's a been long time coming but here is my take on Joanna Dark to celebrate the events that took place in Perfect Dark Zero during the year of 2020, and what a year it actually turned out to be for all of us.

I'm super proud of this one. I've always really liked the Zero design of Joanna, so I wanted to bring it up to the modern day and put my own spin on the character. I wanted to re-imagine Joanna Dark instead of simply re-creating Rare's original, so there's quite a bit I decided to change.

This was a real-time character done for the Unreal Engine. I'm pretty pleased with how I've managed to optimise the model. I was aiming for under 100k tris and managed to get it down to around 80k.

I wasn't necessarily striving for realism too much with this one, I wanted something of a high fidelity but that still had a somewhat stylised feel to it. Her face likeness comes from Winona Ryder. I didn't want the model to be anywhere near the uncanny valley though, so I just used her main facial structure as a baseline. I still think, even today, she would be a good pick for a live-action Perfect Dark film. The short hairstyle in Alien Resurrection for instance, is very Joanna Dark and I'd love to see it happen.

Hope you all enjoy it. Who knows, I may even tackle the original design in the year 2023, whatever happens in that year! Fingers crossed aliens ;)

Altogether 11 materials were used for this character

To keep draw calls down I packed in all the other maps that weren't Diffuse or Normal Maps. Occlusion in the red channel, Roughness in green, Metallic in blue and any Opacity maps in the alpha.

These were the maps I made from scratch using Maya's xGen and baked in xNormal. These were also packed into one map. I used the same map to add the eyelashes, which only really needed a single opacity map. The hair itself added Depth, ID, and a Root map.