MARIA OVERVIEW
Grimstone Valley puts the player in the boots of Maria, a rancher who survived a cult's ritual attempt gone wrong, but lost her arm in the process. Equipped with a mass of tendrils where her arm used to be, Maria seeks to use her newfound powers to defeat her foes, defend her allies, and end the cult's reign of terror once and for all.
As the team's principle 3D character artist, I was responsible for the entire character creation process of Maria, from initial concepts to final Unity implementation. I modeled, rigged, and animated Maria in Blender, and created her textures in Substance 3D Painter. I was also in charge of setting up the player's animator in Unity.
CONCEPTS & ITERATIONS
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Maria's character design and concept art was one of my earliest contributions to the project. Since she's the most important character, her design went through a few rounds of iteration based on team feedback.
I focused primarily on silhouette, value, and general vibe for the first batch of concepts. I then distilled the elements the team liked best into three more designs before turning my attention to color palettes.
Grimstone Valley takes place in an alternate history Wild West, so the various player concepts were all inspired by historical Western wear. Maria's tendril arm also received its own round of concepting, drawing heavily from body horror and eldtrich sources of inspiration.
MODEL & ANIMATION
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- ANIMATION BREAKDOWN
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In addition to modeling, texturing, and rigging, I was also tasked with creating Maria's animations and setting up the player's animator in Unity.
I created all of Maria's animations in Blender. While animating, I made sure to keep our game's distant third-person camera perspective in mind. I exaggerated the more important movements to make them easier to read when the player appears small on screen. I also prioritized flexibility by breaking any longer animation sequences into smaller parts. This gave design greater control over the exact timing of different player actions, instead of having timing be determined by the animation itself.
The player animator itself is fairly straightforward. I worked with design to map out Maria's different states and what priority these states took. This allowed me to then organize the player's animations into different override layers. For example, player death takes precedence over all other states, so the death animation is on the highest priority layer in the animator.
THE TENDRIL ARM
Creating Maria's eldritch tendril arm was one of the more challenging aspects of bringing her character to life. As early as concepting, I kept in mind the potential difficulties and limitations we might encounter when trying to realize the different designs in engine.
Maria has two different tendril arms. One of these arms is part of Maria's base character model. The other is enabled when the player uses the tendril, and this arm consists of separate meshes for the arm and hand.
After a lot of experimentation and trial and error, I ultimately landed on a basic two bone rig setup. One bone is anchored at Maria's shoulder, and the other acts as a target that gets thrown out when the player uses the tendril. While simple, this rig did allow for dynamic length, which was the biggest requirement.
When the target bone hits an enemy or throwable item, a tendril wrap mesh is enabled on the grabbed object, giving the appearance that the tendrils are wrapped around the object.
