- Still under construction -

Iroshi & The Reel-Sword

This project entailed redesigning my own character and creating a game-ready model of them and their weapons.

Concept & Prep-work

Character CONCEPT Art

Iroshi is a character from a fantasy, ‘DnD’-like project I’ve been writing in my spare time.

Because this has been a long term background hobby, my concepts of his design were old, outdated, and generally more amateurish, I took this character model project as a chance to update his design as well as compare my illustrative skills to what they were years ago.

Reference and Inspiration

First and foremost, I had to decide on an art direction. I chose a painterly/stylized aesthetic, similar to that of Activision Blizzard’s “Overwatch” or Riot’s “Valorant” due to my great fondness for the art style.

After establishing the tone of the design through a moodboard, I collected photographic reference of any clothes, armor, or accessories that I wanted to incorporate into the new design.

Finished Concept

The final result of the redesign is a character that is much more visually striking and that better complements the fantastical elements of the story he’s a part of.

Weapon Concept Art

The base concept was katana and a rope dart. Development of the idea incorporated a fishing reel mechanism in the hilt of the sword to combine the two weapons while motorcycle-inspired handle controls transformed it into a unique utility weapon.

This interesting utility allows for things like pulling distant targets closer, grapple-hook style freedom of movement, amongst other potentials. From developing this weapons and considering potential uses, I have many ideas and plan to animate this character and weapon combo as an extension to this project.

Character Material Breakdown

As a final planning step after finalizing the concept art, I broke the character down into sections: skin, hard-surface, cloth, accessories, hair, and weapon.

I did this step to help me get a better sense of the modeling work ahead, as well as get an understanding of the character’s core elements.

Sculpting

Sculpting started with a generic human base mesh which I tuned the proportions of, roughed out the face sculpt, as well as polypainted to help me visualize the final look throughout the entire process.

I then did a stylization pass over the body to mimic the soft geometric look of Overwatch and Valorant characters.

Next I blocked out the clothing as projected extractions off of his body to retain a skin tight look to some of the pieces.

From there I gradually broke down shapes smaller and smaller before giving the cloth thickness, importing hard surface models of the armor plates, resculpting the hair clumps with pre-UVed geo I had prepared, and doing tiny details like tension creases and seams.

FINAL SCULPT TURNAROUND

Lowpoly RetopoLOGY

reference

As with all steps of this project, research is needed before proceeding.

I gathered reference of Overwatch character wireframes to gain a better understanding of industry standards, polycounts, polygon density, and also to pick up any modeling tricks. An example being the flat caps of Junkrat’s grenades not converging to a central vertex, but to an edge which saves the model 2 tris. I go on use similar techniques to reduce the polycount for my character.