Lowpoly Pram
Oh, and Zetta’s here too. He doesn’t seem too happy about being a book… or a seat.
You can grab the blendfile here!
Hailing from Makai Kingdom we have Pram, the youngest overlord of the game and major supporting character turned unspoken mascot. Ironically, she’s probably more recognized as a recurring bonus character in the Disgaea franchise, having shown up in a majority of the games as a crossover character, whereas Makai Kingdom never received any follow-up titles.
This render partially served as the basis for the final colors of the model. I love the gentle hue shifting conveying her affinity with ice.
Despite never playing Makai Kingdom myself, I found myself enamored with Pram’s design. Something about it is just so strikingly elegant with the simplicity of her dress, the refined color palette, and the little zany touches added by elements like the shackles, chest brace, and her weird little imp ears… both pairs of ’em. I think the red and black eyes contrasting her white hair and dress really seals the deal and makes her a standout design in Harada Takehito’s artistic library.
I’m particularly fond of Pram’s portrait in Disgaea 3. The shapes are loud, expressive, and pleasing to look at.
Process highlights
For this model, the part I’d like to focus on is… the face!
I wonder what she’s so excited about?
When it comes to lowpoly models, there are a few approaches you can take to implement face details, depending on your wants and needs.
Sometimes it’s enough to simply texture directly onto the mesh, and create alternative “faceplates” that can be swapped to through a variety of methods such as quickswapping the face mesh for a hidden duplicate, or altering the UV coordinates of the face in order to scroll to a different part of the texture. This approach is usually the most faithful to the “PSX” aesthetic in addition to cutting down a bit on geometry. On the other hand, you may end up using quite a lot more texture space!
However, another approach that I’ve taken a liking to is creating free-floating planes with appropriate eye/mouth textures and placing them in front of the face. This approach provides several advantages: by having separate geometry for facial elements, you can create more expressions for the character without performing additional texture work, as well as give yourself more flexibility in facial animation by allowing for gradual or incomplete transitions between different states.
It also makes it easy to animate separate elements in tandem, as the state of the eyebrows doesn’t have to rely on the state of the eyes, where a simple textured face would require several faceplates to handle all the desired permutations of eye and eyebrow states.
Even the little marks meant to convey the contours of her brow are separate mesh, allowing them to move with the eye as needed.
There are a few additional tricks being pulled here. The eyes are actually made of two discrete elements: one for the sclera/eyelashes, and one for the iris. This setup allows the iris to vanish by simply scaling down in size and sliding behind the sclera mesh as the sclera is squished down to whatever shape is desired. Additionally, a more convincing “side eye” animation can be achieved by moving the iris separately from the sclera, whereas normally one would either need to swap the texture or settle for moving the entire eye.
This same trick is applied to the fang that appears when she grins.
By the way, did you notice anything funny about her mouth?
Smile!
The mouth is just a simple mirrored plane with a few cuts along its length; this allows us enough vertices to create several shapekeys for different states of the mouth. The part I like is the shading- since the mouth is drastically changing shape from expression to expression, we simply layer the UV in such a way that there is a small strip of shade tone at the top of the mouth. As the mouth moves, the shade tone appears to “trace” the contour of the rest of the mouth. It feels a little more dynamic than just creating a hole looking in on static inner mouth geometry, in addition to being pretty easy and saving on the polycount. That said, I probably wouldn’t adopt this approach on higher poly models, but who knows, it could work!
Closing thoughts
That’s about all I have to say on this one. I’m really proud of the face here, and I really loved bringing out the texture of her clothes and hair with a restrained palette and level of detail. If you’d like to see how I innovate lessons learned from the face in this model further, check out Evelyn!