Toshka Matryoshka: the nesting doll

Toshka Matryoshka the Nesting Doll

I am excited to showcase the main character of my graduation project; Skaz-Ka: the Untold Stories. My role in this project was to design the creatures for the mysterious worlds of Slavic mythology.

Toshka is a wooden nesting creature whose abilities are derived from its many layers of shells that reside within him. Every individual layer possesses it's own ability that the player can shuffle through, depending on the situation. The abilities of the layers are as follows: "offense", "defence", "long-range" and "absorb".

The main focus of my work as a Game Artist is to create creature designs within various mythical themes in a stylized art-style. For projects such as this one, I tend to focus on the entire process of the design. Starting with exploring concepts and 3D modeling, all the way to engine implement.

After a lot of researching and sketching, I ended up with making a combination of a Russian nesting doll and a nutcracker soldier.

During the first stages of concepting and playtesting, it became clear that the first designs resembled the Asian culture too much, rather than the Slavic culture (as seen bellow). That's when I decided to replace the faces with a more traditional Slavic looking vibe.

Once I had the design completed, I started with blocking out the 3D sculpt and using that to render the high-res sculpture.

After finishing the high-res model, I retopologised to it 15k-20k tris and unwrapped the model afterwards.

For the texturing, I tried to create a semi-stylised / handpainted feel. A lot of the patterns were either hand painted or made with alpha masks. The maps were exported in 2K px.

The last step is to set up the scene including all the nesting layers to be able to create high quality renders with them, which completes the process and allows me to move on to the next character!