As a short side project, I decided I wanted to make fan art of the game Fight Knight. The game is a retro-stylized first-person dungeon crawler beat em' ep, with aesthetics inspired by PSX and DOS era games of a similar genre.
I absolutely fell in love with the style, gameplay, premise, and music, and the main character's design is simple but perfectly executed.
The modeling was actually super simple, and I opted to leave things like surface detailing in the arm guards and leg guards, as well as the fists, to texturing on the surface. I decided to tackle it this way because I feel that methodology is key to more authentic retro style 3D models.
After that I moved onto texturing. I used a 256x256 texture to keep things nice n low fidelity, mirroring most of the UV maps to save on space and offer each aspect of the model more real estate on the texture to come out clearly. For the shading, I tried to mimic the style of shading in the game, with bright streaks of red and white lowlights and highlights, to make the surface feel more dynamic.
Then after that, I created the armature very quickly! I decided because it was a simpler rig that I wanted to make it as clean as possible and try one or two new things to broaden my horizons. So, at first glance, it looks nice and clean and readable...
But it hides a sneaky secret! The main armature bones are actually hidden on a separate layer, with the box shaped limb controller bones parented to them. The nice thing about this is that the bones can freely detach from the base armature, which is important because the original art style of the game relies heavily on sprite shifting to achieve its animation.
And here it is all finished! You can see the arm and leg portions bobbing on a delayed motion with the main action, which is supposed to mimic the style shown above.
Total completion time for this was around 14 - 18 hours, and for all aspects created from scratch, I'd say that's pretty good!
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