Angelica is one of the characters in the game Enola (project page also available here on Behance). The initial description was that she was a girl with "white skin, golden hair and an angelic face." In the game, during flashbacks, she is 15 years old, and during the "present time" she is 20.

The first step was to make sketches for the character based on the game's "steampunk" style. The sketch above was made by my friend Kozeth.

Then, the character had to be created in the computer. Angelica's model was created by me using Autodesk Maya. Besides using sketches, I also used photo references to nail down the facial features of the character.

An important thing about Angelica was that she only has one arm (due to a birth defect). This detail plays a very important part in the story and is referenced a lot. In the images above, you can see her right arm is covered by a long sleeve, and only those who paid attention actually realized she only had one arm.

That was also a very important detail to connect her to other characters in the game.

To animated the face I setup a FaceRobot facial rig inside Softimage. After setting up the head in Softimage, I exported the rig to Maya so it could be merged with the body rig.

Facial animation was also done in Softimage, taking advantage of the software's automated lip sync tool (facial expressions were added on top of that). The animations were also exported to Maya so they could be blended with the body.

Lastly, as part of the character development, I wrote the character's biography and that served as a guide to other team members when they were creating parts of the game that involved Angelica.

For more information about Enola, check out the game's Press Kit.

Enola

Platforms: Windows, Mac

Release date: September 2014