Boss & Creature Character Pipeline
Eleven months, fourteen boss characters and thirty-two creature variants for a console action title, delivered from high-poly sculpt through to game-ready rig. Astel Games owned anatomy passes, hard-surface armour and Marvelous Designer cloth, then validated silhouette readability at the locked combat camera distance.
- Client
- Confidential — console action studio
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Platforms
- PC, PlayStation 5
- Year
- 2023
- Duration
- 11 months
- Team size
- 12 artists
- Disciplines
- Character art, Hard-surface modelling, Rigging & skinning
- Category
- Characters
Artwork from our archive. High-resolution originals are available on request under NDA.
What the client needed.
The client's previous vendor delivered sculpts that lost their detail after decimation and failed the animation team's deformation tests. Bosses also had to read clearly from a locked 6 m combat camera, so surface detail had to survive at 30,000 to 40,000 triangles with four 2K texture sets.
- Fixed per-character triangle budgets before sculpting began, so decimation never dropped below readable detail.
- Ran deformation tests at 40%, 70% and full range before final topology was signed off.
- Built a shared armour library of 180 bolts, plates and trim pieces to accelerate hard-surface variants.
- Delivered weekly turntable renders plus FBX checkpoints so the animation team could test rigs early.
- Kept one pivot artist on a 03:00 to 11:00 shift to overlap six hours with the client's studio.
- 14 bosses and 32 variants approved with an average of 1.6 revision rounds per asset.
- Every character passed the animation team's deformation testing on first submission in the final milestone.
- The hard-surface library cut repetitive modelling time by roughly 35% over the contract.
Have a similar production coming up?
Tell us the scope and the date. We will tell you what it takes — honestly, including what we would not promise.