Gravity Knight Part 3: Character Design.

Tim
Written by Tim on

Every good game needs characters. Ours is set in a medieval fantasy world. Besides the knight and the princess there are skeletons, bats and gigantic spiders that need to be avoided in order to get to the top of the tower.

From Pixel to Voxel

The knight and the princess were made using pixel art references. If you create a frontal view of a character you can import it to Qubicle and extrude the imported pixels to get a model quite quickly.

To import pixel data from Photoshop just copy it to the clipboard and use Edit → Import Clipboard in Qubicle to create a new object.

In the image above you see a typical workflow. From left to right: 1) Import a frontal view 2) Extrude areas 3) Add more detail, and finally 4) separate the limbs to prepare the character for animation.

Separating the limbs is very easy, too. Just open your character in the matrix editor, select voxels and use Modify → Other → Split Off (shortcut Ins) to create a new matrix.

It’s also very helpful to align multiple variants of a character in a single file to decide which version to use.