Ironhold: 3D Character Design for a Fantasy Adventure RPG

The three hero characters had wildly different body proportions: a lean teenage hero, a slight female engineer, and a broad-shouldered warrior nearly twice the width of the others. Their previous 3D vendor had treated each character as an isolated asset, resulting in inconsistent face proportions, clashing shading models, and no shared rig structure. The companion pet (a corgi) added a fourth body type with entirely different locomotion. On top of that, the studio's target device range included low-spec Android phones with a strict 15,000 triangle budget per character and a per-scene draw call cap the previous vendor had missed by over 50%.

Before modelling anything, Nine Pixels ran a two-day style definition session. We locked a shared face construction formula (eye-to-head ratio, nose placement, jaw shape) that would read consistently across all three hero proportions. We then built three base rigs: a standard biped for the hero and inventor (different scales, same bone hierarchy), a heavy biped for the warrior with wider shoulder and pelvis bones, and a quadruped rig for the companion. With shared bone naming conventions, the animation team could author movement cycles once per rig family and reuse them across characters. Every hero was modelled under 12,000 triangles base LOD with a 5,000 LOD1 for mid-range devices. The companion came in at 3,800 triangles. A shared texture atlas per character family kept draw calls low: all three heroes share one 1024x1024 atlas at runtime, dropping per-scene draw calls by 58% against the previous vendor's output. Enemy archetypes reused modified versions of the hero rigs wherever body structure allowed. We ran weekly handoff reviews directly with the client's Unity engineer to catch integration issues before they stacked up.