Elwin - Taste Of Your Own Medicine

Meet Elwin, one of the playable characters from my team Chaos Panda's project 'Taste Of Your Own Medicine'!

As the character artist for our team 'Chaos Panda', I wanted to create 4 unique player characters as part of the game experience. Elwin was the first character I concepted for the game; I used a high to low workflow, sculpting him in Zbrush first before doing retopology in Maya. I then baked and textured him using Substance Painter, utilising tools like stylised baked lighting. I also rigged, skinned and animated him before exporting him into Unity for our game. His tri-count is 10.691.

As mentioned before, Elwin was the first character I created for the game, so his overall appearance and style sort of set the precedence for the rest of the characters. I wanted to make sure the characters were cute and appealing, and also make sure they fit in well with the art style for the game, and after a few iterations I settled on a chibi-style character, with oversized heads and boots and short little arms and legs. Elwin's grumpy personality quickly took form in my head after I sketched out some facial expressions and I decided to go with it! He was a lot of fun to work on and I'm incredibly proud of how he turned out.

When it came to rigging and animating, I wanted the characters to all share the same rig to save time and be able to have them all use the same animations. This proved to be much more complicated than I expected, as all the characters have slightly different proportions and different tri-counts. Long story short I wound up using override controllers in Unity, which meant more exporting but also gaining the option to have unique animations for each characters with the same triggers in the animator.

I learnt a lot working on this project and I'm so pleased I challenged myself like this!

Check out the other incredible artist's work on our game!
Gwyneth Esteban
https://www.artstation.com/gwynethe
Cody Smith
https://www.artstation.com/athied