Sai Narayan

Just Hank in the glow of the binary sunset 🌅 @sainarayan.bsky.social

That's all folks! Was a fun trip down memory lane doing this breakdown and the response has been encouraging, so will do more in the future!

@ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social is the incredible artist behind all this and everyone should go follow her! 👏 😤

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Here's the final model in Unreal, alongside the wireframe

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May 2025: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social finishes modelling and rigging our main character!

Behold! The Wanderer in all his final glory!

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Parkour

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Here's a more recent concept Rose did for Birdy circa April 2025, and the team loved it, cause of course we did??

LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE TOGETHER 😭

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As we continued work on the Wanderer, we started calling our companion character "Birdy" internally and that stuck around!

We pinned down our visual inspiration to L0-LA59 from Star Wars, and Rose started some explorations in that direction

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9 different sketches and concepts for different kinds of robot cat companions

Every hero needs a sidekick, and the Wanderer is no exception!

In the background, @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social explored ideas for companions, here’s a first take we didn't go with

I may have just read "Save The Cat" for the 1st time and gotten too excited

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Here's that same shot with a stylization shader that Substance Painter provides out of the box

An early test for our stylized texturing workflow

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An up-close shot of the Wanderer's torso showing their shirt, a red scarf, and some cloth scraps hanging down from their back behind them

April 2025: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social finishes up retopologizing in Maya and gets to work on texturing and modelling the Wanderer's clothes and accessories

The addition of a "crotch-harness" was a hotly debated topic at this point

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I wish all beings a very good day ❤️‍🔥

Taylor is chill as heck and incredibly autonomous, fun, creative and talented.

Definitely who you want on your team!! 😤

Color explorations

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Some drawovers on top of the low-poly model from above

Explorations for clothes and accessories

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March 2025: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social blazes through the high-poly sculpts in ZBrush and then retopologizes the sculpts down to this low-poly guy here in Maya

The mesh is about 50% done, the other 50% is belts & cloth!

Other goodies in the 🧵

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Pringles Or A Transformer?

I made you Pringles in Unreal

Some other concepts that were giving Majora's mask vibes

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Some color explorations

Red is classic game protagonist but we personally liked the Blue/Cyan vibes more

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Some outfit and helmet concepts Rose was messing around with

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February 2025: @ProfessorOfSass starts to lock in on the modelling and ZBrush sculpts of our main character

More renders and goodies in the 🧵

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Control rig is crazy, I wanna experiment with some procedural animated mech/loader-bot type stuff next milestone

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Hello World! Messing around with Control Rig

Don't tell our animator ( @maddiebee27) I posted this because she'll eat me

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A different direction that we didn't go with is this guy, that pulls from Prince of Persia (2008) more heavily

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Here's the front/back of the base forms

Wandy been doing those squats 💪

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January 2025: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social is ready to start sculpting! At this point we've locked down a lot of the design and are ready to start modelling/retopo/rigging

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Digital drawings

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Pencil Sketches

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November 2024: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social starts to dial into a specific look and take on the Wanderer and we push forward in that direction

Sketches and other cool goodies in the🧵

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September 2024: @ProfessorOfSass.bsky.social does her first round of concepts for our main character!

Our main inspo was streetwear + cyberpunk meets wasteland/scavenger vibes

And Cloth. Lots of Cloth. Love Cloth

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