Iroshi & The Reel-Sword
This project entailed redesigning my own character and creating a game-ready model of him and his 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Because Iroshi is from a long-term background hobby, my original concepts of his design were all around outdated. I took this character modeling 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.
FINAL LOWPOLY RETOPO
Weapons
The weapons were made using virtually the same process as the character: references, concept, high poly, low poly, baking, texturing.
Rigging and Plans for Animation
With the model finished, Po Hsuan Lin has rigged the model for me.
As the rig is being polished, I began animating with it. I plan to use Iroshi for a new game demo like my demo reel project, Stone Monkey, only with more advanced gameplay and animations.
KYLE P. MARTIN
KYLEPMART@GMAIL.COM
I am an LA based character animator with the unique ability to combine exceptional animation, Unreal integration, and compelling storytelling to craft striking and dynamic game characters.
