GET SMASHED!! (or.. How I put a friend of mine in Project M)

It began as a joke for quota. My concept teacher had tasked us with creating twenty designs for a character we were gonna have to model. The deadline was tomorrow morning, it was late, and I was tired.

I was thinking about my recent trip to Japan in the last two weeks of summer prior to my junior year: We were in Kyoto taking a slow day just wandering around and goofing off in the very traditional Japanese town when we stumbled on a small shop near the Golden Pavillion. My friend got super excited and hopped toward the store admiring a katana-hilted umbrella sitting in a bin out front. It was black with a white/yellow-ish middle and apparently he had always wanted one. Said he wanted to mess with the police since civilians aren't allowed to carry katanas. He quickly found the store owner, an elderly woman, bought it and carried it everywhere the rest of the trip unsheathing it epically out of it's tote every time there was a hint of perspiration. (Fortunately for him, typhoon season was upon us)

Anyway it was late and, well.. quota calls, so I quickly doodled a modern vigilante that uses a katana umbrella as a weapon to fight crime and called it a night.

Maybe it's because I drew him so big, I dunno. But when I presented the above image to my class the next day it was clear which design was the favorite between my classmates and my teacher. I was told to go ahead with my katana-wielding vigilante design with a more fleshed out (colored) render.

You know, something not too complicated with some ideas on what kind of character he might be.

It was during this phase that I began researching the technical end of the project as sculpting human features was new for me. I set my end-goal to beat the character models found in Yakuza 4 and 5. Specifically, that of my favorite character, Shun Akiama:

"You must look better than me!"

From there, it was ZBrush time! Finally I could actually spend some time learning this program! I built a rough block out model in Maya to sculpt on top of and spent most of my time in ZBrush focusing on the face using my friend's face as a reference. I was told to change his initial jacket from the one in my color concept render as it was considered by my teacher to be too generic. He was right; the new jacket looks way better:

For the UE4 version, we were given three major criteria: 1) It could not exceed 50,000 tris (easy) 2) Our total texture space could not exceed the equivalent of three 2048 maps (entirely doable) and 3) No more than six materials (That's gonna be interesting)

In the end, my model's tri-count was at about 47,000, the textures were at about 2/3rds the limit, and I was given permission to use an extra material for the white of my character's eyes! Frankly, he's quite bitchin'

The whole time in the back of my mind, I knew the finished model had to be put in Brawl. My friend has mained Ike in every iteration of Smash Bros. since he was first introduced. He's become so synonymous with Ike that he actually goes by that name. We would often joke about how it's basically like he's in the game and how funny it would be if he were actually put in it.

So, I made it happen..

Ryota's Smash model in BrawlBox

This required a completely retopologized/re-rigged/re-weighted model and total reworking of his textures, materials and shaders to conform to Brawl's character standards. Essentially, I did the entire assignment twice in the time given to do it once.

Unlike the high-end UE4 model, Ryota's Brawl model is under 12,000 tris.
Getting this to work, I think I crashed Smash Bros about one hundred times. The hard part is that when something goes wrong, you are left to your own devices to figure out what went wrong.

Welp, that about wraps it up for the Ryota Project. When I finally showed my friend the project he was beyond thrilled! I learned a ton about building characters for video games (and how to mod Smash!) Hopefully I'll be able to create another character soon.


Happy smashing!