Arcane inspired character - work in progress
When people think about the Arcane style, they usually think about the very distinctive shading and painted look. And honestly, they’re not wrong. It’s a style that sits somewhere between 3D and illustration, which makes it both challenging and really interesting to study. For this project I wanted to explore that balance myself. The goal was to recreate the feeling of the Arcane style while understanding how the mix of hard and soft edges works on a face.
Stay tuned to see how it turns out.
Smoke
The Arcane style has a really interesting approach to shading where it mixes soft gradients with sharper edges. I studied the Asaro head to better understand the balance between those edges. I started with simple shading that looks more like the Asaro head before going in and hand painting.
This is the stage right before the hand painting.
Shading
Retopology
After finishing the sculpt, I created a retopology of the head to simplify the geometry. The goal was to reduce unnecessary detail and create a cleaner, lighter mesh that is easier to work with. This helps keep the model efficient while still preserving the overall shape of the sculpt.
UV mapping
Once the retopology was done, I created the UVs for the head. The goal was to lay out the UVs in a clean and organized way to make texturing easier later in the process. A good UV layout also helps keep the texture resolution consistent across the model.