3D – Week 6 – Assignment 3 – Character world

This week we began preparing for our third assignment in the 3D1 course. The first thing that we were to do was to create a character each, that another student then will be modelling. I designed the character Sam, a young adult humanoid sphynx cat, that Christoffer will be modelling.

To begin with I only created the images for Sam, with a turnaround and an action pose, without any thought on what kind of game he could be placed in. During a lecture I got to flesh him out with a backstory, personality and a world in which he lives. I’ll be describing the gameworld here.

This is a world that basically resembles our world, with most of today’s comforts and technology, as far as is necessary in a world inhabited by humanoid cats. The cats walk upright with a slightly human-esque anatomy, though they still mostly resemble cats, with triangular ears on top of their heads, a short snout, big eyes, digitigrade legs and a tail. They talk and reason like humans, and to some extent even dress like humans, though clothes are optional as their fur protects them in the same way as clothes would have, and beautiful fur is something to be proud of. They live averagely as long as you’d expect a human to live, and their typical height is somewhere around 1.3meters.

It’s a relatively modern world, with large cities as well as small country villages, with class differences between wealthy and poor very much like our world and political squabbles just like ours. It has a vast variety of different kinds of cats inhabiting it. Most of the world’s inhabitants believe in something commonly known as “the Great Spirit”, which isn’t a single deity in itself, but rather a name for the magical essence that flows through all life. The Great Spirit is also known as the world’s “Life Energy”, and it’s said that all living beings contain some of this energy, which is why they live. This energy could be compared to a soul, and when someone dies their energy is said to be reunited with the Great Spirit, becoming part of the energy of the world. There are cats that can come in contact with this energy, and that are able to control the energy through magic.

The ability to control and use magic however isn’t something that all cats can do. It’s something that you’re born with, and it doesn’t seem to be something that is inherited, but rather something that just happens, though no one knows how or why. It is believed that the magic is created by drawing energy from the Great Spirit, shaping it to ones will by the use of symbols, words and movement. Many cats see this as something that violates the Great Spirit, and as something that should be forbidden, whilst some claim that it isn’t violating the Great Spirit, but rather the Great Spirit that has given the cats these abilities and that is helping them. In most of the world however it’s prohibited for common people to use the magic as it’s deemed dangerous. Most of the world’s inhabitants are afraid of the magic as it is possible to use it to create much destruction. Earlier in the worlds history there’s been many wars, many fought with magic as well as “ordinary” weapons. This might be the reason that so many fear magic, as they all know how dangerous it can be. Magic isn’t just destructive however, and can be used to mend and heal as well as creating things instead of destroying.

This is the world that Sam lives in, a world that shuns him for his lack of fur and that fears him for his ability to use magic. He comes from a shattered family where he was moved around a lot among relatives that never really liked him, until the day that they found out that he could use magic and threw him out altogether. He was however found by an elderly cat named Mundu, who was also a magician and who took Sam in. Sam became one of Mundus apprentices, and finally found the family that he’d never had. Mundu died a couple of years later under uncertain circumstances, and one of his associates, Liana, took care of his apprentices. There was something suspicious about her though, and Sam sets out together with his best friend Melinda to search for the truth about what happened to Mundu and what Liana really wants.

And that’s it for now. If you want to know more about Sam, and follow the progress of him being modelled, you can find that over on Christoffer’s blog, as he’s the one that will be modelling this character.

Cheers! /MPh