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Updating our favourite hover-bladed protagonist, Svet, has been a huge part of my work when I put on the character artist hat here at melonhead games.

For a little bit of history; the first design sketch was done in about 10 minutes after brainstorming the design and ideals of our main character at the Global Game Jam, back in 2018. Coming up with the key features was the quickest way to get my ideas down.

We ended up with this; a rough, albeit fairly solid (if I do say so myself) design of our main character.

Seeing as this entire project evolved from the global game jam, there was always going to be an update to clean up what was hastily crammed in on a weekend in February 2018; from the environments to the character. Which brings us to the first pass I did; textures.

This was all about the time constraints; at the game jam, we opted to use flat colours and then run a post processed cel shader over it; as that was a simple and effective way of getting a stylistic result that would also save a bunch of time. It was the first thing on my list of reworks. If I remember correctly, I did also take the opportunity to resolve the more egregious topological errors, but the major changes were all just in the texture pass.

The boots got a quick redesign and I busted out my old friend substance painter and the result was a Svet with much more definition of materials and generally just a bit more life through the shading, instead of just the flat colours previously applied.

Moving on to now in what will be the last major overhaul, this has been a pretty big rework to solve some fundamental issues I never addressed after the game jam.

Primarily the wireframe and rigging set up as well as some proportion issues which have been bugging me for a while. So, I’ve taken the opportunity to squeeze as much personality and thought into Svet and her accessories. I did a quick paint-over of an old render to see what kind of direction I wanted to take the design in, and taking a step back to actually think about how the character is being portrayed, and what I can do to imbue a sense of story through her design has been super useful. I tend to jump the gun and dive into 3D a little early as that is my strength, but planning these things out is really important.

Moving into 3D, the final sculpt has ended up looking like this; taking the cues I planned out in the sketch I set to modelling and refining all the details to line up with the concept. Most of my time here was spent on her face as that was one of the major things I wanted to get right; however, retaining the same feel and personality while restructuring all the proportions was an interesting hurdle to jump.

Reimagining the character without losing her original design and personality has been a challenge overall, but I am happy with what I have learned and where this has evolved to in the end. I got to level up my skills, as well as push the design and character to the next level, and for our Renegade; the extra care and attention to detail is well deserved.

Soon with Pat jumping in with the newly rigged and textured model we will have some slick new animations and a constant stream of new action shot screensavers and backgrounds for our computers and phones!