I was on a four person team, working on this mini two-week game jam as a 3D Character Artist for the main two characters - Frank the old man and the Rat.

I found references for a low poly style the team and I agreed on beforehand for this game and I found a few real references of rats to use during the box modeling phase. For Frank I sketched out a quick character sheet first as he would be more recognizable than a generic rat.

After adding basic materials to different areas of each model, I added a Blender rig to each character (I used the cat rig for the rat and deleted any unneccessary bones). I tested the weightpainting on each rig as this part of the process usually gets a bit tricky since it's a mix of weight painting fixes and mesh changes that allow the character to look "correct" while it's moving. Although tedious, I do enjoy the satisfaction of getting it to work correctly. Then the different movements needed for the game is created by basing them on the mechanics the team and I agreed upon according to a priority based list. Walking, Idling, Throwing, Injured, Jumping etc are just some of the various individual animations I animated from scratch for this project.

Now that all the essentials were finished, I could go in for finer details like creating custom textures for both characters by using the initial blocking of colour I did earlier to help me see where the UV textures need to go. Using Clip Studio Paint, I added some finer details in Frank's face and the rat's fur (although this didn't end up showing up too clearly in game after all).

For our game's Itch.io page, I used some assets my other team memeber made (see the 3D keyboard keys) as well as some images I found on google to quickly create a Controls Image to add to our page so that players would clearly be able to see how to play the game. I also rendered out the two characters in different poses and places using Blender, just to enhance the UI in game as well as on the itch page.