The Windwalker - Character Art
Blender, Maya & Unity - Spring 2024
The "Windwalker" project, made for SFU's Narrative & New Media course, saw me as the character artist for a team of 4 adapting a script into a game.
I designed and modeled the protagonist, Toyen, his spirit partner "Makobii," and a monstrous version of it - going through iterative sketches and sculpts to design, and then retopologizing, unwrapping, texturing and rigging them for the final models.
Team: Wallace Chau, Dominic Irawan, Merritt Lum, Aden Trathen
Original story by Abbey Perley & Dylan Tse
Molding the Makobii
The most challenging to sculpt was the Makobii, who we wanted to have a laid-back but tense posture, and balance a devouring mouth with a ball-like, almost cute silhouette. Several major, unexpected design questions when doing sculpt iterations:
- What should the anatomy look like? How do I shape a mystical, spirit-like creature while maintaining a sensible body structure?
- How big should the main storytelling elements - its mask, fur and mouth - be?
- How do I design for its normal hunched, ball-like pose while modeling in a standard, easy-to-work-with A-pose?
Loose iteration
Doing early, experimental sculpts, I first opted for ethereal, snake-like forms (1), but it felt too pointed and hostile, with body structure unclear.
I began rounding things out, and adding *just* enough structural landmarks (2 & 3), but proportions–especially its head–still felt distinctly off.
So, I tried something new–instead of *assuming* what would look best in its ball-like, main pose, I tried sculpting that directly. Luckily, this paid off in spades–it helped me realize that the head should be much smaller and tucked in, the legs much longer and thicker to emphasize its hunched, observant pose, and hands added for expression, and provided proportions I could measure and transfer to the final iterations (4 & 5).
This let me capture the character’s unique energy: unknowable and tense, but tempered, jaded and mystical. More widely, it showed me value in both careful measuring and experimentation in the sculpting process which I hadn’t seen before.
However, looking back, this process clearly could've been shortened with a stronger understanding of shape theory & more refined sketches to work off. Translating and sculpting characters to 3D will always reframe a design and require adjustments, but it's clear I went into the process too quickly & somewhat directionless.
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