Introduction

Hi, I grew up in China, but living in the U.S. I have been working in the entertainment industry for many years and previously I was a Character Artist at Survios working on multiple VR games include “Westworld Awakening”, “The Walking Dead: Onslaught”, “Battlewake”, “Creed: Rise to Glory”.

My main goal for this project was to use the industry’s latest character modeling techniques plus my artistic skill sets to make the character as high quality as possible. From this project, I’m happy to say that the No.1 thing I have developed and improved was the aesthetic sense, i.e. what makes your art look good, or rather, what makes your art look bad. Learning to work and think as an artist is kinda like a loop where you have your criteria, then you get some feedback from the community (because everyone’s feedback matters), and eventually, you do some revision of your criteria. You repeat this same process over and over again to develop your aesthetic sense! For this article, I’m sharing with you the techniques I used for this project and the way I thought based on my understanding and knowledge of character art.

Gathering the Reference

The first thing I did was that I spent the time to look for concept art that I think would look good for 3D and also look for inspiration from references to support the concept. The personality pf the character is very important because it gives the character life! For this character, I wanted to give her an overall royal feeling. Even though she is the daughter of the king, she still likes fighting!

Here are some of the images that I gathered for the assets I wanted to redesign. Then, I did a basic block-out to decide the shapes and the positions I want everything to be. This was the early stage to make sure everything looks correct overall. That is to say, the character proportion, sizes and positions of all other assets need to look correct. One of my ways of measuring things is using my fingers to compare the sizes of all different assets.