For The Elephant Rider, I strived for the texturing and art styles of Supervive and Fortnite.

The process of developing her has been fun and iterative and her key elements stem from the (fictional) game design for her character.

She rides an elephant mount that she can send in a direction and then grapple to. She can also grapple to an enemy or pull them to herself to initiate a fight. Additionally, she can also dash in a straight line while being tethered to her mount. This can be used for a fast escape, or for starting a longer range engagement.

With those gameplay needs in mind, I had a pretty good idea of what key elements her concept needed:
– Hook and winch machine on her back
– Heavy kneepads
– Steel shod boots
– Worn and ready gear

Combined, it would give her the visual credentials needed to back up her gameplay.

Similar to how a design will sometimes need changes during production, halfway through the sculpt process, I found it lacked a strong enough theme and needed some additional unifying elements. That combined with her mount led me to the idea of a Mechanica Cowgirl.

Something that Supervive does really well is mixing a very compelling third-person/close-in view of the character, with a distinct and recognizable top down silhouette and bright/readable colors and notably giant weapons.

I wanted to do something like that with the oversized hat, and large winch. The shape and size of the hat serve a number of visual functions that support gameplay and make the jobs of the animation team easier.

Initially I decided to have a pink accented color scheme, with dark shirt and pants, but I felt this lacked the punchiness of the art styles I was going for, so I changed it to the fire theme instead. The alternate version with more pink to set it off would be better suited in Supervive, where characters especially need to stand out from the environment immediately. The new color scheme also provided a more natural way to gradate the textures values from the bottom of the character up.

Finally, I dusted off my Substance Designer skills for the environment backdrops. Node based scripting is something I do in Blender and Unreal for every project. So it felt natural and fun picking it back up, and making textures procedurally!