Character Spotlight: Kaelis
Kaelis Vintra. Stalwart hunter, stubborn adventurer. Member of the Expeditioners Union. Acquisitions Officer of the landship Red Atlantic. Current gig contract with Verloren Industries.
Kaelis is one of those characters who has existed in the back of my mind for years. Though, she was not the first character created for this project. That distinction goes to the creature from the pilot. He’s had a long history, and he’ll get his own character spotlight one of these days also. As the story goes, after I completed the tech demo of Forlorn, way back in early 2018, I wanted to continue the universe somehow. It was not particularly fleshed out at that point, so I started to brainstorm elements for a new story, and what the world outside the room of the demo could be. At that stage, the creature was the hero character, and I thought it would be fun to bring in a human character to interact with him. Some kind of explorer or something, and together they could find a big monster and it would do something and it would be all slow and moody and stuff. It was all pretty vague. All why doing that, I had been developing a second thing in the background, an adventure story with a more early 1900s feel. It would have swashbuckling and big cities and cool vehicles and all that fun stuff. I had been working on that for years at that point, and I had enough to lay the foundations for something.
Then one night everything changed. It may sound silly, but I decided to randomly rewatch The Matrix on some early summer night in 2018. It had been well over five years since I had last watched it, so while I knew the movie backwards and forwards, having seen it dozens of times as a kid, I was able to watch it with somewhat fresh eyes. And when the credits rolled I had a realization. The Matrix is just everything the Wachowski’s enjoyed - cyberpunk, anime, etc. - smushed together into one package. I then began to look at a lot of other things I enjoyed, and realized they too were basically several eclectic influences rolled into one. I looked at all of the disparate little stories I had, and realized they would all work better as one unified thing. Suddenly this dark gothic fantasy became another part of the same universe as this Indiana Jones-esque adventure story. Cosmic horror and high adventure, it all began to come into place. The creature became the obstacle guarding the prize, and the nondescript human became the treasure hunter. And Kaelis was born.
The design of Kaelis came from a couple sources. I had designed a random character with the bomber jacket for a project that never got off the ground, and I guess somewhere in my mind I must have liked it. At the same time, that design became merged with the medieval stylings of the Forlorn tech demo. It’s one of those things where her look just suddenly appeared in my head once I figured out the path of the story. The biggest change that occurred in this stage is that the original shade of the jacket was blue, to avoid looking too much like the Rocketeer or something, but I decided to change it to Red anyway so it would stand out more in the heavily blue toned environment, as a way of signaling that she doesn’t belong.
My wife, who is a far stronger artist than I, agreed to help me flesh out her design. My problem is usually I can picture what I want, but I have trouble putting the specifics to paper. I drew a couple of quick sketches about her general look, and my wife was able to whip up a couple of her own. She immediately nailed the look I was going for. From there she designed the main T-Pose, and I took that and began the modelling process in Maya. This process took around 2 months from empty file to final texturing.
Rig in hand, I began work on the pilot. That took about six months, premiering in October of 2019. Upon completion, I began to construct the full length short film. But, as with most things, working on the pilot was such a learning experience on all fronts that Kaelis, the first thing I had made for this project, was woefully out of date. I had initially envisioned her, and the film, with a somewhat more stylized aesthetic, and so in the pilot she has more basic textures and these oversized legs. But, as work on the pilot progressed, the style shifted towards a more realistic tone. By the time I began to assemble what would be the first episode of Forlorn, it dawned on me that Kaelis didn’t quite fit in the world anymore, and she could use another pass. In addition to her texture quality and features, there were also many people who saw the pilot and didn’t realize the character was a woman. One thing I was going for was to give her a bulky, almost comfortable look, but I think I may have gone too far, especially since we don’t see her face much for the first half. So, I got to work remodeling and repainting the rig from the ground up to match the existing art direction, and to give her just a bit more of a feminine side. She acquired new armor pieces to fill out the outfit, more normal human proportions, and under the mask I remodeled her face and hair.
I also took the opportunity to spruce up her arsenal. Her rifle in the pilot was too obviously just an M1 Garand, and I decided it would be more in universe appropriate for it to be bolt action. And her revolver was far too stylized before. I looked at about a half dozen turn of the century weapons, bashed their components together, with some lore appropriate touches. As for her sword, I just thought I could do better. After a month-long pit stop, Kaelis was finally, officially ready, for reals this time.
The last addition to her came between episodes. Originally her face had been crafted with a blend shape system, which is, for those unfamiliar, a system in which the face is linked to several different facial shapes and expressions, and you can blend between them in the animation. I personally never cared too much for blend shapes as the primary means of facial animation, particularly in a more cartoonish character, because unless you have a considerable amount, you’re left with a somewhat restrictive set of facial poses, and sometimes you need to stretch or push things in a more exaggerated fashion. After a few tests I wasn’t too happy with how it looked, so I threw out the system and replaced it with a bone based facial rig. Now she has a couple dozen bones in her face, all controllable, with the ability to add or adjust them on the fly, should I need to. Adding bones to a rig in Unreal has never given me trouble, but adding blend shapes has caused me some headaches. I still have a few blend shapes in there, but mostly for subtle corrections and some automated things. Since you don’t see her face for a while, I didn’t start on this until after the first episode had premiered, making its (very brief) debut in Part II.
Who knows where we go from here. I don’t plan on doing any more significant changes to the rig for the rest of the production, if I can help it. As for the future, I 100% plan on continuing the world of Forlorn, and bringing new faces into the mix. Whether or not Kaelis is involved I don’t want to say, as to not spoil anything. It’s been quite a journey realizing just this one character, and the idea of more excites me considerably. Kaelis is just one of a few characters in this particular chapter of Forlorn, most of which we haven’t met quite yet. I plan on doing deep dives into the characters as they show up. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we take a look into the original Forlorn character.
