Vyder | Eclerays

I made this realtime character for the project Vyder from "3K ELO" based on conceptarts by Romain d'Escrienne : https://www.artstation.com/makkhariel
Since the first iteration which you can see on my portfolio (TakOba), we decided to change the game from a third person view to a side-scrolling view, which meant characters were to be seen from much further. I opted then for a simplified texturing workflow, using a set of gradients representing different features of the character so it can be read efficiently even in high-pace combat. This is the first time I tried this technique, which was inspired by a few sources but notably Aurélien Baarsch's approach on shading his scenes with colors instead of detailed textures. The workflow relies more on models as you can't fake it through a normalmap, but the result is really smooth and colorful. And as a bonus, making skin variants is extremely fast while maintaining a solid control over the result.
Last but not least, we needed to go fast on the animation process, since the Midasi was the first character we iterated with, I had to reshape the Ecleray into most of the Midasi's features (face was the most toutchy to achieve as both character design originally had very different looks. While I could simply leave it as is and skin only the major features, I wanted to get the face expressions Thomas Chaumel did on the Midasi as well, and it pays off when you're on close range views :))

That's all folks, hope you'll like it !