KING - PERSONAL PROJECT
I created a stylised character for a personal project, inspired by the Clash of Clans aesthetic from Super Cell Studios
This character was created as both a personal challenge and a long-term creative asset. I set myself a three-day deadline to see what I could produce under pressure, while also aiming to expand my personal library of characters for use in future animation and storytelling projects.
Stylistically inspired by the bold, appealing look of Supercell’s Clash of Clans universe, the goal was to build a character suitable for both high-end games and animated media. The model was developed with a focus on versatility — using high-resolution sculpting and detailed textures to ensure it holds up in both close-up shots and wider cinematic frames.
The base character sculpt was created entirely from scratch in ZBrush, starting with a simple blockout approach to establish primary forms and proportions. I used a variety of reference images throughout the process to guide the overall shape language and stylisation. The goal was to develop a versatile base mesh with stylised proportions that could serve as the foundation for this character, as well as future models in a similar visual style.
Once the sculpt was complete, I imported the character into Blender for retopology. This stage focused on creating clean, animation-friendly topology while preserving the key forms and silhouette from the high-res sculpt. The result was a low-poly mesh optimized for real-time use and ready for the next stage of the pipeline — UV unwrapping and texturing.
I love sharing these process videos on my social media, here’s a brief insight into the head retopology below, and samples of the finished Retopology.
The majority of the texturing was completed in Substance Painter using a PBR workflow, allowing for stylised yet grounded surface detail. Once the textures were exported, they were integrated into Blender and prepared for use across other 3D software as needed.
For additional custom touches, I used Blender’s texture painting tools to manually paint shading details and apply war paint. The Ucupaint add-on proved especially useful here, emulating the familiar layer-based workflow of Substance Painter within Blender’s native painting system, and providing the ability to preview these textures in Eevee and Cycles in real time.
Props & Accessories
I created a range of stylised props and accessories that complement his personality and role. Each item was carefully designed to fit within the character’s visual language and overall silhouette, while adding depth and storytelling potential.
These assets were designed not only to enhance the final renders but also to be fully game-ready and modular, allowing them to be reused or repurposed for animation, gameplay, or cinematic scenes.
For the rigging process, I used Auto-Rig Pro within Blender. As I was working on a tight deadline, Auto-Rig Pro proved invaluable — streamlining the process and allowing me to quickly generate a functional, animation-ready rig. Despite its speed, the tool offers a high degree of customisation, making it easy to adapt the rig to the specific proportions and needs of this character. It also provides built-in export options for both Unreal Engine and Unity, making it an ideal solution for real-time projects.
There’s so much more to this process than I’ve been able to squeeze into a single page, but working on this character has been an incredibly valuable learning experience. It’s helped shape and refine my approach to character creation, from sculpting and texturing to rigging and presentation.
To wrap things up, I animated and lit the character in Blender, rendering out a short animation test available below. And yes that is my personal top quality voice acting.
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out project KING — I really appreciate it!