Licensed IP — Character Art & 3D-to-2D Rendering
Character art for licensed IP titles: key art and skin illustrations delivered at print-scale resolution, plus a 3D-to-2D pipeline that renders modelled characters into hand-drawn-looking 2D art. Working on an established IP is a different discipline from original design — every silhouette, costume detail and weapon has to survive an approval chain that includes the licensor, and nothing may drift from the reference.
- Client
- Huohu Culture — licensed IP titles
- Engine
- Unity
- Platforms
- iOS, Android, PC
- Year
- 2024 — 2025
- Duration
- Rolling, per title
- Team size
- Internal art team
- Disciplines
- Character key art, 3D-to-2D rendering, Character modelling, Skin & variant production
- Category
- Characters
Artwork from our archive. High-resolution originals are available on request under NDA.
What the client needed.
Licensed characters come with reference packs measured in hundreds of pages and a licensor who will reject anything that reads as off-model. The delivery format made it harder: skin illustrations were needed at resolutions up to roughly 19,000 pixels wide for print and large-format use, which is unforgiving of soft linework, texture stretching or shortcut detailing.
- Built a per-character reference bible before drawing: costume layers, insignia placement, weapon proportions and colour values sampled from the official pack.
- Ran the 3D-to-2D route on characters where the client needed multiple angles: model first, render, then paint over — so every angle stays on-model by construction.
- Kept linework and shading on separate layers at working resolution, so the same piece could be exported for phone store art and for large-format print without redrawing.
- Standardised the render pass — camera, key/fill/rim setup and material presets — so different artists produced a consistent 3D-to-2D look.
- Scheduled review cycles against the licensor’s cadence rather than our own, building in a revision round per milestone instead of reacting to rejections.
- A run of licensed-IP characters delivered across key art, skin variants and 3D-to-2D renders.
- Final illustrations delivered at up to roughly 19,000 × 9,000 pixels — print-grade output from a game art pipeline.
- The 3D-to-2D setup became a reusable internal template, cutting setup time on each new character.
- The same pipeline is now offered to clients who need multi-angle consistency on original characters.
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.