Low poly turntable animation of Ink Witch's Poison Bridget design, which blends Bridget from Guilty Gear with Poison from Fatal Fury, in the style of Mega Man Legends.

Low poly render of Ink Witch's Poison Bridget in the style of Mega Man Legends.

Well this one kinda took off on Bluesky before I got to posting it here. Hurray? (To be clear, I'm very grateful for the positive response. I just have weird feelings about being seen.) Anyway, I love this design by Ink Witch, and a friend mentioned it had some Mega Man Legends vibes. Thus, my brain worms were activated and my fate was sealed.

This model's process was very straightforward:

  1. Loaded up some Mega Man Legends models and textures to analyze and investigate for triangle counts, shape usage, and general texture size and strategy. (I have done this previously and somewhat recently watched someone else do it, but hey using refernce is cool and good it turns out.)
    • The nature of PSX style texturing is that you generally create a single "large" texture sheet that will contain everything, so a lot of the work there is just trying to place things well as you go along (which does take me a lot, lot longer to do than N64 style textures because the pixels will be crisp with no blur to hide behind).
    • The Mega Man Legends polycount leaves you with enough room to breathe, but is still tight enough to keep you from running wild.
  2. Modeled her in Blender with a lot of comparison to reference. (I used to load reference images directly into Blender to model over, but I'm trying to get better at trusting my own eye.)
  3. Created a texture sheet in Asesprite matching the sort from Mega Man Legends while matching up UVs. (This step alone was most of the process...)
  4. Rigged (simply), posed, and rendered. (These steps alone took comparitively no time at all.)
  5. Composited renders in Da Vinci Resolve and Paint.net for final "deliverables." (Not that I was delivering this to anyone, but, y'know.)

After reviewing the cutscene models for Roll and Tron Bonne (474 and 405 tris, respectively), I was aiming originally for around 450 triangles. Bridget landed at 462 tris with a single 256x256px texture. I'm really happy with the model overall, but I do question how close I got to the Mega Man Legends style. Specifically, the jacket shape is not something that exists in game. Most of the geometry in Mega Man Legends is convex shapes, but this jacket is most certainly concave. I have been considering if I could have broken up the jacket into overlapping convex segments (somewhat like how the hips blend into the legs), but I was already pushing my triangle count at that point. It largely came down to being satisfied with the silhouette, and in particular I had no plans to animate this model or allow much in the way of arm movement.

That's actually where a lot of my core decisions stemmed from: I wanted to keep everything simple. Ink Witch's pose wasn't far off from a resting A-pose. If I was going to animate anything, it'd be extremely minor, but I was intending for a static pose. Most of this comes back to the jacket, or rather her arms and the sleeves. Her upper arms are severely limited in their range of movement, and her forearms don't have much more range themselves. Posing those far from their resting position would reveal all sorts of seams and stretch that jacket into weird shapes we want to avoid.

So in terms of simplicity, how did things go? Well... The modeling process only took about 6 hours. That felt great. But then the texturing took 20 hours. That hurt. Every part of that process felt and was so long. Toward the end, I almost certainly committed some UV crimes to reuse some texture bits instead of drawing similar but unique sections. Once I was over that texture hurdle, it took less than 2 hours to rig and pose.

And now we get to the lede I've buried: I streamed this whole process. I've been wanting to stream the entirety of a model development for a while, and this was the one I finally had the spoons for. I won't claim this is a particularly entertaining set of VODs, mostly it's me focusing and working with the occassional thought escaping, but for anyone curious, here's the YouTube playlist.

Multiple development stages of the Poison Bridget model are shown in sequence.

Poison Bridget development stages based on progress made during each stream.