The result is a fully animatable 3D character. The colors and texture you see are actually painted on a flat surface, pretty much like you would wrap a present in gift paper. The green objects are helper objects, used to animate the face. The grey objects above are the bone system, used to animate the body. The vertices of the arm (kind of like the “skin” of the arm) are attached to the bone, and they move automatically. Animators don’t drag around each point when they want an arm to move – they simply grab the arm bone and move that instead. The “rig” is a way to manipulate the points of the model, so that you can make it move. You can roughly distinguish the shape of Guaka, but it is nothing but a barebone structure. These are helper objects to manipulate the bone structure of Guaka. A triangle is always flat, and it is the base building block of 3D models.Īnother thing you can see in the picture above is a couple of green cubes. Under the hood, each polygon consists of several triangles. A polygon can have any amount of points (“vertices”). A polygon is a little part of a surface, you can compare it to a single tile in a bathroom floor.

If you look closely, you can see that this fellow has 1.036 polygons. This is what Guaka looks like in 3D Studio Max:

After we settle on the final concept, it’s time to proceed with the 3D model. Another Monday, another update! Last week we took a look at the concept art process for Guaka the Molerat, a character that lives underground in the ancient city of Xio.

Ancient cities steam greenlight