Ken Capelli

Main character Clash for a game titled MINDF*CK, which eventually morphed into dystopian giant-robot action game Slave Zero. The project was pre-Matrix by a few years; I was bringing SKIN TWO and SECRET style fetishwear to the costume art direction (and was doing wedge heels quite a few years before they came back into vogue). There’s a whole sketchbook of great visual development that accompanies this character and I had a lot of fun developing this fucked-up, bad-ass mercenary chick. Her proportions in the model sheet are off (head is small, arms short); I corrected in the 3D model.

It took a lot of back and forth to get the jointed 3D model looking right… consoles and PC’s weren’t powerful enough yet to handle single-skinned, skeletally driven meshes with any performance back then (in those pre-3dFX days), so 3D characters were built like action figures with rigid, jointed segments. They were low-poly, so you had to rely on Gouraud shading to hide the boxiness/ faceting of the models. Animation was applied directly to the mesh segments.

Of particular importance was how Clash looked from behind in a 3rd-person perspective, the primary view of the game and character. Basically, her ass had to look great (my razor). In under 500 polygons. I wish I had screenshots of her in action from the prototype, it was satisfying watching her run.