Character Design - Skull Kid

This was made for the Character Design module at HKU Games. The assignment was to make a humanoid character that would fit into a Legend of Zelda game, and I picked Majora's Mask 3D.

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For this I did a bunch of research into how those character models were made, and tried to replicate the process as well as I could. Here you can see the finished 3D renders + the 2D turnaround, and on the rest of the page I will explain more about my process.

2D process ☆ 3D process ☆ Concepting

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For more of my character design, see here.

2D process

Moodboard

Thumbnails

Figuring out Shapes and Colors

3D process

Blockout process

v1 and v2

Final blockout

Low Poly process

Marjora's Mask Model Research

So I wanted to stay within the budget of the other Majora’s Mask 3D models. These have an average of 895 verts and 1415 tris, which I want to stay in the ballpark of, with a hard limit of 1100 verts and 2000 tris, since these are the maximums in the models I looked at.

Marjora's Mask Texturing Research

UV Unwrapping & Texturing

For the UV unwrapping and Texturing I took note of how the original game did this. I feel like i managed to imitate the style pretty well.

Concepting

Character Profile

Tagline: Be the show you want to see in the world.

Name & Title: Sparks, the flammable fire dancer.
Age: Child
Gender: N/A
Pronouns: they/them/it/its
Job: Fire dancer/entertainer
Body Type: Skinny
Ethnicity: Skull Kid – Skull kids are mischievous kids who are trapped inside the Lost Woods. They enjoy playing together, and they do not like adults. They are very lonely.
Character Summary: Sparks is a skull kid who is very lonely. It has very self-destructive tendencies. They are mostly made of straw, and a fire dancer. The most important thing for them is to entertain people, and to make the world a better place than they found it. It is still mischievous like the other skull kids, and likes playing pranks & stealing stuff.
Controlling Idea: To make the world a better place than they found it.
Fatal Flaws: It does not care about itself, which also makes it think that they do not deserve a lot of good things in their life. They struggle to give themselves good things, and run away from people who love them.

Backstory

It is tired of being a skull kid, and being stuck in the Lost Woods, and wants to leave. Making their way out of the woods, they learned more about Hyrule and the world around it, and it inspired them to become a more social character. It wants to detach from the stereotypes and public image around Skull Kids, and develop their own identity. .

(Real Life) References:

Mollymauk Tealeaf (Critical Role Campaign 2 – The Mighty Nein) because of leaving every place better than he found it.

Myself – some of the worse aspects of myself (self-destructive tendencies, urge to run away when people care about me)

My friend Emily – Fire dancer :)

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