In this blog post I will detail the character I have been assigned to model for Assignment 3. This character was designed and written by Camilla Jacobsen.
Character
The character I will be modeling is a young boy around the age of 7 or 8 named William. He is the oldest son of a lord, and serves as a page for a knight.
William is an energetic boy who loves swordfighting and playing with the other kids around the castle. He likes to climb buildings and trees, and can be a bit of a troublemaker sometimes, but his earnest and positive attitude lets him easily get away with his mischief. He dreams of one day becoming a legendary knight.
William wears a simple wool tunic and leggings, with leather shoes and a leather belt with a metal buckle. Although he often gets dirty from playing around and working, he’s expected to keep himself clean and proper as the page of a knight.
Setting
Sword in the Stone was an influence for the medieval fantasy setting.
Camilla’s game takes place in medieval England. It has fantasy elements such as evil wizards and magic daggers, and one cited influence for the world design was Disney’s Sword in the Stone. It’s a warm, colorful world, with the village from the opening sequence of Beauty and the Beast as visual influence.
In this setting the country is split up into several shires each ruled by a lord, who serves under the king in the capital. Other than the standard noblemen such as dukes and counts, priests and knights are also considered to be of high societal standing. Priests are highly respected due to the prominence of the Catholic Church in this country.
The environment visual style would be something akin to Beauty and the Beast‘s opening, with a bright, warm and colorful palette.
The majority of knights are sons of noblemen who have been sent away to train as pages, just like William. However, occasionally someone from outside the hierarchy can be knighted for performing exceptional service for the king. Female knights are also not unheard of, but very uncommon since most nobles prefer to keep their daughters at home.
The country has been in a long period of peace and very little famine and disease, which has led to much prosperity. At the start of the game, an evil wizard takes over the lands, and William goes on a journey to save England and become a magical knight.
Game Description and Competition
Camilla described her hypothetical game to me as an action adventure game where you explore and fight enemies, something in the style of Zelda or Ratchet and Clank.
The game’s target audience would be young, somewhere in the age range of 5-7, and after some discussion we both felt a good hypothetical platform would be the Nintendo WiiU. Three competitors Camilla gave me were Mario, Sonic, and the Lego games.
Modeling Style and Challenges
Skyward Sword has a simple modeling style with blocky hair and straight clothing. The textures are colorful and lack small details.
Camilla has cited Zelda games as a reference for modeling and texture style of this character, particularly Skyward Sword. The models in this game have a sort of stylized blockiness to them, with thick, geometrical hair and clothing. The textures are quite simple and omit most smaller details in surfaces, and are shaded with a paint-like style.
Camilla’s turnaround of her character.
William’s design is quite simple in general. His torso and limbs could all be modeled out from basic tube shapes. His tunic goes past the hips, but with its relatively short length the legs should probably still be modeled out in full length under the tunic, with perhaps a bit of the lower body modeled out as well.
His belt buckle is the smallest detail on his general body, and I don’t think it needs to be fully modeled out. The buckle should work fine as just a simple rectangular shape on the belt, with the buckle itself drawn out primarily in the texture, and the detail strengthened with normal maps.
I think the biggest challenges in modeling William will be his hair and his hands.
While his hair is short, there’s quite a lot of detail drawn out in the character sheet for loose strands. I think the base of the hair could be modeled out a bit for clarity and silhouette, but I would probably have to use a number of alpha maps with loose strands of hair hanging out. The fringe above his face, and where his hair ends at the back of his neck, would be most in need of these alpha maps. This will be a challenge for me to pull off well, since I’ve never worked with alpha maps before, or modeled hair.
The hands will be a challenge to model out simply because they are not very simplified. William has all the five fingers of a normal human, they’re all quite thin, and clearly separate from each other. I’ll likely have difficulty with this part of model because of my lack of experience, and the fidelity with which the hands would need to be modeled out with. There will be a lot of detail work going into this small part of the character, and I’ll have to make sure to keep the polycount in mind when making the hands, trying to cut corners wherever possible.
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