Brychni, Knight of the Night Sky

Overview

Brychni is a knight of the sun, moon and stars, the right-hand woman to a dark lord and eventually reborn two millenia later as Leonine Quietus (second robot model). Despite her position in the world, her final wish was to bring joy to humanity, a wish twisted by her reincarnation into only bringing joy to itself. She is half-Welsh and half-Indian, named "freckled light" (from "brych" and "roshni") for her birth under a cloudless starry sky.

Initial Design & Modelling

The initial design took inspiration from archived images of knight armour, combining metal armoured dresses with the ideas of asymmetry and a curved moon sword with a round sun shield. Some specific inspirations were one-armed jousting chestplates, fantasy leggings and the crescent shape in general. Four-pointed stars were incorporated mainly in the center of the design to fill out the "sky" between the sun and moon sides. The colouration consisted of mainly dark steel with highlights of bronze and fantastical blue materials, a colour scheme kept into the final design.

Modelling happened by first creating a medium-poly model in individual pieces, the same modelling method as used for the robot models earlier. Some subdivision was used, but it restricted the model to being rounded, so aspects like the solar shield and shoulder pad used no subdivision. A lower-poly model was created by manually retopologising over the first model intended to make UV mapping and rigging easier (as well as to incorporate sculpted details as a normal map), but the large amount of asymmetry and separate objects proved very difficult to work with, not to mention that both models were very low-poly for artistic standards, having been created from an optimisation standpoint. This led to the original model being remade from scratch.

Redesign Modelling

Brychni was remodelled using the previous model as a rough guide, but undergoing heavy redesigning and a large increase in symmetry, this time all as one object (not counting weaponry) using a subdivision modifier with edge sharpening for access to hard ridges while making retopology a matter of reducing the subdivision level. (This also ensured a large amount of edge loops, optimal for ease of UV mapping.) Asymmetry was mostly reduced to being in material types during texturing, and otherwise was only featured in the rotated stars on the skirt and the weaponry.

The entire body is now star-themed with additional four-point stars, relegating the sun and moon themes to the weapons. The sword has been changed to a straight rapier with a crescent hilt, and the shield is a much smaller buckler for deflection rather than blocking, as if the central extruded sun has a field of gravity.

Rigging & Animation

Rigging was relatively simple in Blender; the existing groups created for UVs were partially reused to select different areas of control for each bone and add them to a relevant vertex group. This was a fast enough process that, after doing it once and failing to save changes, it was no problem to re-rig afterwards.

Animation began by using default human rigs in Blender adjusted to include a sword and shield position to block out key poses for a number of attacks, which were screenshotted and traced over. Then, Blender's action editor was used to manually animate an action for each move, including a walk cycle and death animation. This was done by manually moving and rotating (and, for exaggeration on key elements like the sword during a big swing, scaling) individual bones and keyframing them to different times, adjusting the positions and timings until the animation was satisfactory. Some animations also used different interpolations, such as an instantly snapping 360-degree rotation after Solar Flare/Comet Sweep since it includes a twirl that needs to be reset from. The use of action keys meant that the animations were automatically imported into Unreal alongside the model, fully functional out of the box, meaning only audio needed to be added at this stage.