Art Spotlight: Kill la Kill

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hi Sketchfab community, I’m Andy Vargas and it’s super great to be here today writing this. I am a character animator, and I have been working on games for around 4 years here in my small country Colombia.

When I started with this fan art animation from the Japanese anime “Kill la Kill” I was testing some new silly facial rig things for an upcoming project at work. We were looking to some ways to add more detail to characters since in mobile we are pretty tight in the use the resources of the devices. Sometimes we have to aim for pretty low specs tablets and phones in order to gain more market. So any extra joint or any extra poly counts a lot for the device performance.

I was so in love with Ryuko and the show that I thought about making some fan artwork of it. I studied the character and did lots of drawings of her until my co workers pushed me into taking her into 3d. It was a pretty good idea! As a game animator my portfolio depends on what I do at work, and sometimes games get cancelled or postponed for so much time that at the end I have not much to show. So it was a great opportunity to make something of my own and start building a new reel. I agreed to them and then I saw the chance into testing this new facial rig that I had in mind with her, and that’s how she was born.

As an animator it was an amazing experience since you rarely get the chance to animate a character you love. You can find lots of rigs on the internet, some are pretty amazing, but some how if they don’t appeal to you and don’t inspire you, they are just that, fancy rigs that end up in your download folder. So I took Ryuko more seriously and I put lots of time into making her the way I wanted (so I didn’t have any excuse into leaving her). My expertise is in video game animation, so I made her the same way I would make a character for a game. I keep a poly limit, a joints limit, worked in a pretty simple texture and all that stuff that counts for video games and pushed her to the limits. 3DS Max and Photoshop were the tools I used for this project.

I got to make three animations inspired in the show, the one I uploaded here was the first I made. It was from a particular shot from the show where she is having a meeting with other characters and then she slams this chair and I found it pretty cool because it was shot that totally represents her as a character.