About Me
Hello Sketchfab, I’m Malwina Czech, a Game Graphics Production student at DAE Howest in Kortrijk, Belgium.
Since I’m very busy with the university whenever I have some free time I try to work on personal projects like my most recent one “Moving to the Horizons”.
I’ve always been a very creative person, putting all of my energy into a variety of fields from handcrafting and cosplaying to drawing and now 3D modeling, which I enjoy the most. I do my best to give every project a piece of my character and heart to make it unique.
I wish I had more time during my studies to work on personal projects, but completing the Bachelor’s degree is my main focus for now. After I get my Bachelor I hope to work in a cool company that creates stylized games. I am working on getting my portfolio ready for that feat.
Inspiration
The main inspiration for creating that scene was the newly announced Animal Crossing (A.C.) game called “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” for the Nintendo Switch.
I was introduced to A.C. New Leaf a year ago and really fell in love with it (sadly really late).
When I heard about the announcement of the new game I felt like I really needed to make a piece of fanart to celebrate it! I thought of our Villager, ready to move to the Island of New Horizons.
With this scene, I captured the goodbye-ceremony of that exciting but also somewhat sad moment.
References
For the references of the environment, I looked a lot at my own A.C. New Leaf town on my Nintendo DS and screenshots of the game on the Internet. I wanted to give the town a look I like so I modified some of the features of the town to my preferences without losing the game’s style!
There were no airplanes in previous A.C. games but they got introduced in one of the A.C. New Horizons trailers. So to give my scene a touch of the upcoming game I replicated that plane and made it look like it’s coming to pick the villager up and bring her to the new Island!
For the characters, I used three of my favourite villagers and the game’s most important NPCs. And of course my own main villager in my favourite outfit!
Composition & Design
When working on the design and composition of the project I thought of the limitations a screen has and tried to break them for a 3D scene. With that goal in mind I decided to transform the bottom screen of the Nintendo DS into the environment of the town.
For the setup of the environment I placed the main villager’s house in the front and the other buildings in the back of the DS to imitate the layering of Animal Crossing with, e.g., the train-station being always in the back. I also adopted the curved ground of the game to my scene which gives it a lot more depth.
I tried to include all the iconic parts of an Animal Crossing town in the scene. That is why a big town-tree, a train station with a bulletin board next to it, Re-Tail, and some public works projects like the yellow bench had to be there! To make it more lively, I added a bunch of flowers and butterflies.
I kept characters that naturally belong together, like Reese and Cyrus or Isabelle and Tom Nook, who are organizing the moving, close to each other!
Finally, I gave the Nintendo DS more personality by adding some A.C.-related stickers.
Modeling
3ds Max is the software I used for modeling and animating this project.
The modeling is really low-poly since I like working that way and it also fits the style of the game. Houses and the environment were really simple and constructed out of very little geometry. Characters had a slightly higher polycount and, for more complex shapes like flowers, butterflies, and treetops, I worked with opacity to save polygons.
The villagers have a poly count between 390 and 700 triangles. The three basic villagers are simple and built with the same base mesh. They only have different types of ears and tails. NPC characters like Isabelle have a slightly higher count since they’re all unique.
The polycount increased with the importance of characters and also the number of accessories. That is why my main character has 1.1k triangles.
I had to keep the characters low-poly but also animatable, which means that I had to add extra loops to the elbows so they could bend properly.
To save time and texture I worked with symmetry for all the characters.
Texturing
I used 3D-Coat and Photoshop for texturing and 3ds Max for unwrapping. It is an unlit scene so I had to paint the light information into the diffuse map since that is the only texture I’m using (and opacity). Using symmetry for the Unwraps saved a lot of time!
During the modeling and texturing process I looked a lot at the references to get the style and shapes right.
Rigging & Animation
Rigging and animations were also done in 3ds Max. For the rig I used 3ds Max’s implemented CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) and worked with a simple modified human rig.
It is great to use the 3ds Max plug-in if you don’t really want to get into rigging yourself.
For animations, I looked at the original game’s animations and tried to recreate the movements. I first focused on the main action, e.g., Tom Nook looking down at his phone and back up, and then added a soft swaying motion on a second animation-layer.
Finally, I repeated this process for every character.
Besides the characters, I also animated one of the key elements in my scene—the New Horizons plane. To tell the viewer that the plane is approaching, I flew it across the screen a couple of times, starting from the back and coming closer each time. To give it a cute and natural feel, I added some shaking to the movement.
Since the clouds are also always moving in the Animal Crossing games, I also animated them in my scene. To achieve this I had a bunch of clouds on a plane cut out with opacity that move towards the viewer. Behind that I added a blue gradient representing the sky.
The finishing animation of the saving screen was tricky to do since it had to be timed with the sound effect and run smoothly.
The effect of the screen being closed by a circle getting smaller was done with morphing.
Vertices of the circle were simply pulled together to cover the screen, thereby replicating the way the Animal Crossing games usually handle loading zones.
After that, planes with the letters on them drop down behind the black plane and come forward one-by-one to mimic the way that letters appear to the sound effects when saving in A.C. on a Nintendo DS.
Music
I really wanted to have music playing in the background to enhance the experience.
I chose the soundtrack “Town Tree—Animal Crossing: New Leaf” since it fit really well. Afterwards, I added flying propeller plane sound effects that get louder the closer the plane gets. To wrap it all up I recorded the saving sound from my Nintendo 3DS and added it to the end of the soundtrack.
Finally, the most challenging part was lining up all the animations and sound effects.
The audio was edited in Adobe Premiere.
Sketchfab Setup
I set the scene shading to Shadeless since I had painted my light information into my albedo.
I also played around with the “Limit Orbit Camera” option, allowing the viewers to move just slightly on the axes and prevent them from seeing how the scene looks from the side.
Post Processing Filters are great to make the scene look more beautiful! I always play around with the “Sharpness” first—it makes the scene more crisp. For this project I also added some “SSAO” since I wanted all the AO to be pushed a bit darker to get more contrast.
Finally, I tweaked some settings in the “Tone Mapping” tab and applied an animated grain filter on top to give it an “old game” look.
Thanks
Thank you Abby, for reaching out to give me the opportunity to write about my artwork! It’s my first ever blog like this and I really enjoyed it and am beyond happy being able to share it here on Sketchfab with this amazing community!
I have discovered many inspiring artists on Sketchfab and there are always new artists appearing who surprise me with outstanding works! I’m glad that we are able to support and learn something new here with the help of this community!
I am really grateful for all the comments, likes and support I’m getting here! It truly means the world to me and always puts a smile on my face!
Sketchfab really has helped me a lot to grow as an artist.
Thank you, Sketchfab! <3
You can also follow my journey here:
ArtStation / Twitter / Instagram
About the author
Malwina Czech
Game Graphics Production Student at DAE Howest
