Obelus follows the story of a scrapy robot named Arlo on his journey to retrieve a power core from The Spire which is protected by the robot villain V3XA.
V3XA's drone patrols the forest and frozen wasteland outside of the Spire and serves as an extension of her.
V3XA was sculpted in Zbrush, retopologized in Autodesk Maya, and textured in Adobe Substance Painter.
V3XA went through many design changes throughout preproduction. We wanted to achieve a sleek yet powerful and scary look. In the original pitch V3XA had hands a silhouette that looked more human, but she is meant to be the opposite of that.
We pulled inspiration from spiders, especially black widows. For her robot mechanism and how she was built we referenced movies like Tron.
In the Obelus lore V3XA was born from Artificial Inteligence so her design has subtle hints to common AI mistakes in media one of them being her hands with 6 fingers.
For the final model V3XA's topology ended up being denser than originally planned so her shape could hold better in Unreal Engine.
