Background Boy Studios

(11/2020)

Shop Fusion Collab - Splatoon 3

Hooooh boy, I have a lot to say about this one.

Let me preface this part by saying that this section would straight up not exist without the talented work of my teammate Nico. Not only did he model/rig Cordelia and the background, but it's thanks to him that I was able to learn the Blender animation pipeline. He was extremely patient with me and answered every question I had, and for that I'm extremely grateful.

For this section, I animated the shopkeeper Cordelia, from the game Dead Estate! While developing this part, I pitched the idea for a Splatoon 3 section and agreed to do the art for it regardless of what game it was paired with! That game ended up being Dead Estate, a game I had never heard of up to that point.

So, what followed was a period of deep research into the game as well as Cordelia, so I could get the best understanding of how to portray her in the Splatoon universe. First thing was first, I had to redesign her. Even for SiIvaGunner projects, humans existing within the Splatoon universe is a bit jarring, so I decided that for Cordelia's model sheet, I would try to jazz her design up to make her a better fit for this artstyle!

I explored some potential species design before deciding to make her an urchin, as I felt like it'd be the coolest way to adapt her hairstyle. I made some minor changes to her outfit and passed it along to Nico for modeling!

(image from Nico's Twitter post on his contributions, def check it out)

Needless to say I was blown away with how well he adapted the design. It came out better than I could have imagined. What soon followed was me forcing myself to learn the Blender animation pipeline from scratch!

It was a very interesting but invaluable process. I am a 2D animator by trade, with very little interest in expanding to 3D, but the more I was exposed to Blender, the more natural the process came to me. I was very surprised. I think the animation took me about a month in total to create, as I was balancing it with schoolwork at the time, but I'm very happy with how it came out considering my 3D experience level.

Beyond the 3D animation side of things, there was also the 2D assets needed for the UI, which I recreated from scratch through editing software with the help of some gracious Splatoon modders who were willing to help me rip UI and SFX from the game. All of the unique 2D weapon icons were drawn by me, each being direct callbacks to actual weapons from Dead Estate! Eagle-eyed viewers also may have caught that I snuck in a teaser for Prince Fleaswallow's upcoming section in the top right of the UI, which required me to make a Splatoon-styled head icon for him!

The plot:

Dead Estate - Shop Fusion Collab

This is one of the parts where i did everything for visuals, from concept to final segment, a lot of effort went into getting the UI elements game accurate, since there was no known way to mod the game every animation had to be remade basically from scratch, which complicated things once i realized the amount of things that had to move every time an item was hovered over.

but i am proud on how the part turned out, and i'm so glad the devs enjoyed the part as well. Some Development Sketches