Mononoke (San) – Real-Time Character Project
This character was created for my Character Modeling and Sculpting class at Gnomon, taught by Tyler Young. It’s based on the beautiful concept Mononoke (San) by the incredibly talented Jude Smith. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qry2AL
Over the course of ten weeks, I followed a full character production pipeline—from initial blockout and sculpting to retopology, texturing, and final rendering. I continued refining the piece in the following semester with mentorship and critique from Ben Lee.
The final character was rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 5, with an emphasis on game-ready topology, clean UVs, and optimized textures.
no snow
with snow
I wanted to capture and push that mood further in 3D by creating a custom snow shader. The shader uses world space to layer snow over the original materials.
I used assets from the Dark Ruins Megascans sample to build the background.
Pairing this with the snow shader and lighting setup in Unreal Engine helped enhance the overall mood and reinforce the concept
wireframe lowpoly
highpoly