Recently I've been fairly busy, but also admittedly a bit directionless. I was really unsure what I wanted to do with Aurora now that she's essentially finished, but after thinking about it, I think I know. I want to continue to follow my inspiration from Guilty Gear and try importing her and another character into a fighting game.
And for that, I would need another character, or maybe even a few.
Being inspired by fighting games, my thoughts for character designs immediately gravitated towards a concept that's pretty familiar to any fans of the genre: character archetypes. One of my favorites of these archetypes is the Grappler, a big body heavy hitter that relies on overwhelming the opponent with guard breaking offense.
And as far as specific inspiration goes, I chose one of my favorite characters, Potemkin!
I created a super rough sketch of what I wanted for the character design, that being stocky, plus size proportions for a bit of body diversity compared to Aurora, and making her also an anthropomorphic feline character to play opposite to Aurora being a canine. I decided early on that despite not fulfilling the same archetype the same way other rival characters in other games do (i.e. Ryu and Ken, Ky and Sol, Kazuya/Jin/Heihachi, etc), I still wanted them to be the main rivals of whatever type of fiction I'd be putting them into. This would be represented mainly by their color schemes and species.
And so, I got to work. The proportions didn't end up as stocky as I would've liked but pushing them any further than I already did looked a bit odd. It might be something that I might play around with more as I develop more designs for this concept, but for now, this was fine.
The gloves were super straightforward, mostly because I designed them from the get-go to be. I didn't want to have to worry about a lot of moving parts or heavy sculpting for the gloves, since I haven't had a lot of free time lately, but I wanted to make sure they'd still look visually interesting when colored and shaded.
I ended up not reusing the same rig as Aurora because there were a lot of custom bone controllers and shapes that wouldn't carry over, but at this point, basic rigging is second nature.
Here's the first basic animation test! One of the fun things I did was use jiggle bones for the tail, so it naturally sways and bounces without having to manually animate it.
Then an initial texture! This was just kind of a first draft, and one of my friends, rightfully, called me out on the color scheme being very ripoff-y, so I decided it'd be a placeholder. The texturing process was once again really time consuming, as the interior lines all had to be done using UV seams.
An update to the placeholder using lowlight color grading, showing the color as a lot more vibrant.
The more finalized palette and side by side with Aurora! I bumped up her fur brightness, swapped some colores around, and overall tried to make her pop a bit more so she doesn't sink into dark environments so easily. I also did things like up the saturation on her hair.
And with that, they're nearly ready to rock! They look pretty natural in the scene together at a variety of angles, and I'm ready to animate them duking it out a bit!
And just as a bonus, the beginner animations I'm working on for my reel of these two.
And, there we go! it's been a busy couple of weeks, but I'm really happy with how everything is turning out. The style of the characters is looking fairly consistent, and just need to be touched up a bit.
The real nightmare is going to be importing them into Unreal, but that's a trial for another day.
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