Arbiter - Monthly Recap - January 2020 (Patreon)

Ahoy! Character modeling season has begun! Which basically means it's gonna be a good 4-5 months of me talking about what I did without really showing anything, hah.

This month, I spent the first couple weeks tweaking and polishing up my base model for the characters. This essentially serves as a generic, nude, character model from which I'll be building all the other characters (one for males and females). 

The first character I started with was actually a backer character, Xiu. The order in which I'm tackling characters is somewhere between their importance story-wise and difficulty from a modeling perspective. While certainly relevant, the backer characters are lower on the importance list, so I decided to start with them.

Xiu in particular has a pretty simple design, but somewhat complex hair. As such I figured he'd be great to start with, as hair was one of the things I was most nervous about (I ended up modeling his hair twice to get it looking just right). I'm waiting to get to the animation phase before I show these guys off, but at the very least I can show you his butt. 

After Xiu I decided to do the monks before tackling the other backer characters, as they're relatively simple as well (and bald!). While Xiu took about a week and a half to finish, the monks only took a week. I had to do make some slight changes to their concept art (thanks to GravityDusty for helping me out!), but thankfully it didn't throw me too far off schedule.

The monks serve as guides for the Arbiter. They take care of the temple (hub world) and provide useful information for Ashe on his quest. They're effectively walking tutorials, explaining how a lot of the mechanics work and spewing plenty of useless information about the game's world/lore.

There will be about seven or so monks in the game, each with their own name and personality, and I'll be varying them up with different eyebrows and facial hair as well. Some of them were named by backers and patrons; others will  either be more seriously named or based on in-jokes from the game's Discord. All in all the monks aren't to be taken too seriously, so I decided to have fun with them. Big thanks to MGO for their original design and GravityDusty for the touch-ups!

There's one more monk variant I've got to work on, but after that I'll be focused on finishing the backer characters. It's looking like characters should take about 1-2 weeks each based on complexity, though I'm hoping things will pick up as I start getting momentum. Either way though, pretty much the entire first half of this year will be focused on character modeling. I'll try to show off as much as I can without spoilers, but I think it's much more exciting to reveal characters once they're in-game and animated instead of just a t-pose turnaround. We'll play it by ear, but for now I'm gonna keep things close to the chest.

Lastly, GravityDusty also did some fan-art for an upcoming character, Luna (who she also designed)! Luna is Ashe's mentor and predecessor, so suffice it to say she's pretty important. I'll be modeling her in a few months, so look forward to me talking about it and not showing anything!

Cheers,
Jordan