Cyberpunk Skater Girl – Real-Time 3D Game Character and Location

Hi everyone! RetroStyle Games here! As an art outsource studio, we develop Game Artwork for clients from all over the world. So, today we are going to make a detailed breakdown of one of our recent projects — Cyberpunk Skater Girl!

Who is this? She is a punk-stylized real-time 3D game character with unique design and rebellious temper. For her, we created a complete 3D environment full of high quality props. And here is her story of creation:

Usually, specialisation of RetroStyle Games is isometric projects, such as Manor Cafe, Event Tweens, etc. But we can’t live without challenges! Therefore we decided to try something new, something not typical for us, but nevertheless new content should be high quality stylized and match our level and vision.

In search of references to inspire us, we tried many different genres, games and art-works. At this point, we have experienced Valorant, Overwatch and Ruiner. Phenomenal art-style of these games impressed us so much that we decided to develop a specific location, space stylized to match the right mood.

Firstly we needed to create a concept. After several different suggestions we selected one of the most lovely genres — Cyberpunk. Not dark, night and rainy — but bright, sunny and cheerful. And yet neon and fantastic. Our environment should look like a suburb somewhere in California 2080-s.

Then our team collected all props and objects which should be in the scene. One-floor buildings, palm-trees, garbage on the streets, fast food point, fences, ATM machines, garbage cans, holographic advertising screens, pipes, sewers, fallen palm leaves and fruits, antennas, power poles, even mattress — everything finds its place in our cyberpunk location.

While creating the environment, we got an idea for a unique 3D character design, who could live in a cyberpunk world. That’s how Cyberpunk Skater Girl was born. Our team agreed that the 3D character should be a female, with charisma, fun and rebellious temper.

On the earliest concepts she also had a gun and robot-assistant, but we eventually realized that it didn’t fit into the atmosphere of an environment and our character. Therefore we searched for other interesting highlight and found one — a flying skateboard! It perfectly fits into our character and created location.

After blocking the scene was done, artists of RetroStyle Games started a full-cycle modeling for games approach and texturing each object. They drew graffiti stains on the buildings and streets, signs on the cafe and advertisements on the holographic screens. The new Unreal Engine 5 helped to achieve a high quality, great look. But there were several issues with software that we will share with you below.

Whole process of creating Cyberpunk Skater Girl consists of sculpting, retopology, UV-mapping and texturing. Her design creation was such a wonderful, inspiring task. We have considered a few different looks before accepting that one which you see now.

Our goal was to create a cyberpunk character, but with an unusual for this genre sunny, bright and happy mood. Based on that concept, we created colorful clothes for her, made a punk haircut and filled her looks with fun accessories. Even her skateboard is made in the same style as Skater Girl is. Everything should fit into the general concept.

In the developing process, we used several engines and programs. Initially all effects have been created and tested in Blender. This software really saved us time and hassle. In Blender it is really easy to work at the concept stage because of everything you need at your fingertips: work with meshes, a flexible system of procedural textures and simple animation.

Final textures for effect were made in Substance 3D Designer. There it is easy to create seamless textures for export. For effects we had to create a few types of noises, gradients and basic textures.

Then, we used Unreal 5 to assemble entire effects, but this project gave us a hard time. Every program has the same way of working, but the logic of work in Unreal Engine is quite different, so the first phase was a bit unusual.

Our effects contain coordinate-animated textures, distorted by noise and few blends. It is a simple effect and used only in static, so effect assembly was quick and simple.

At the finish of this project, we found a new challenge! Our team did a semi-automatic transfer of location, light and shaders from Unreal to Unity. Team of RetroStyle Games creates Concept Arts, Digital Graphics and CG Animation for games and apps for companies all over the globe. Game-ready, fully rigged and skinned 3D character models right for your project!

Working hand-in-hand with us will ensure you time and cost saving, high-quality content and efficient scaling of your art team.