Alita Unbreakable Warrior

3D MODELLING - RIGGING - TEXTURING - 3D ANIMATION

David Lozano Sánchez

LEAD ARTIST

Project overview

Hi! I'm David, the Lead Artis of JellyBits Studio. Since the art team was only formed by 3 people, I've also been generating art for the game. I've worked mainly on the enemies, modelling, texturing and animating them. I've also made some props and buildings for the map and other little things.

The Goal of the art team was to produce the best art for the game and trying avoiding using the assets provided to us done from people outside the project

Software

Autodesk Maya 2018

- 3D Modelling
- Unwrapping
- Texturing
- Rigging
- 3D Animation

PureRef

- Image References

Photoshop CS6

- Texturing

Concept Discovery

At the beginning of the project, we propose 2 different kinds of Art Style. Both were cartoony, but I was in charge of the proposal in black and white. The idea was to make the game 100% in Black, White, and Gray, like if you were playing the manga.
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Sadly, this idea was discarded because of the few time we got to develop the idea.

Mad World Reference

Ido in black and white

Buildings

Combining buildings

We faced a problem at the time of making the city. We couldn't create enough buildings to maka a city. So we decided to make the buildings so you can use the first floor of one building, with the second floor of another building, or use all the buildings as low level.

Problems

01

Repetitive

Even we tried to create a bunch of different buildings, it still looks repetitive in some points. We solved this by creating some pipes, roofs and neon signs to decorate.

02

Plane Textures

The textures look plane and ugly at the beginning, so at the end, we update the textures to make the game look better.

ENEMIES

CYBORGS

The cyborgs are the main enemy in the game, I did the modeling, texturing, rigging, skinning and animation of the melee cyborg and the range one.

For the creation of the 2 cyborgs I take references from the manga, when you can find this cyborg at a lot of places.

To aboid the problem of time that would have supposed creating an entire second enemy, I added a cannon to the arm and changed a bit the textures.

BARRELMAN

Barrelman is a thematic enemy for Scrapyard Level. His behaviour is simple: He runs through you and start spitting fire. Once it dies it explode.
I made the model, textures and animations for the Barrelman and Ricardo Gutierrez made all the particles and effects.

The Design for Barrelman was in charge of Alfonso Sánchez. He designs all the attacks and told me exactly what he wanted. I've based the design on the manga when you can find a little image about this enemy

FROG

The Frog is the main enemy on the Sewer level. It's a funny enemy that attacks from distance and jumps away when you're near. I was also in charge of making the model, textures and all the animations.

The Frog was a funny enemy. I animated it in a more cartoony way. I added a controller to the stomach so I can make it bounce and scale it. Also I added a mouth that oppens when it shoots.

MAKAKU

The final boss of the game was a great challenge. It added some technology I've never done before. Also, it was a quite big enemy and the animations should be brutal.

Makaku is the first big enemy Alita faces in the manga. And the design team decided it will be great for our first boss. The great challenge was the part of animating the fingers. I faced a big problem because our engine didn't support blend shapes. In the end, I made a big control panel with all the controllers for the hand. I used a size constraint for the base of the fingers and an IK_Spine for each finger. Then I added controllers for the curve and animate them.

What I've learned

ALWAYS BACKUP YOU PROJECT - I can't count the number of times I lost work because I save in a wrong file or maya crashed or I made a mistake that I don't know how to solve. It's really important to make backups of your work. You don't know what could happen.
PLAN YOUR WORK - It's really important to plan all your animations and why are you doing the things, so you can plan to make a good rigging and make the right bones. Sometimes I just have to add controllers or bones just during the animation process.
NEW SKILLS - I have mainly focused on new enemies, so I have improved my skills at animating, moddeling and rigging.