Thali from AFK Arena Low-poly 3D model

Hello everyone, Let's start with the mains goal of this project as well as the techniques used there. Thali is a character based on AFK Arena. In the game, she is a maniacal mage that uses fire as skills.

In this project, I wanted to be as close as possible to the original character design with a more detailed tone. I started this project at the end of 2021, thereby, I made the body of the character, then, I was discouraged from doing the hair, the jewelry, the texture and the rigging. After a long break, I went back seriously to this project in december 2022 to finish it completely by adding those missing elements. Basically, to make this character with blender, I used differents methods from differents youtubers of Blender and particularlythree that were really useful :

• the first one is TomCat. Thanks to him, I make my whole character in edit mode to avoid to retopology my whole character.
• the second one is Ryan King Art. He helped me for the baking and procedural materials that are avaible in this blender file with the shader editor.
• the third one is Polyfjord. I watched his tutorial about fireball and it helped me to make a decent animation.

Concerning this file, it contains a fully rigged and textured character with the rigify addons_ (you can also change the baked textures into procedural materials in the shader editor by plugging the principed BSDF [BSDF] into the material output [surface] or the mix shader [shader] into the material output [surface] depending on which procedural material you are. --> procedural materials give you a better result in Blender but it is not often compatible with any other software you want to export this project)_ This character also has hair particles that are used for Thali's fur. You can also put the render and realtime off in the [Modifier Properties] in order to hide those particles if you don't like them.

This file also contains pre made poses that you can directly select in the pose library. The character contains differents textures :

• Normal textures :
• 4K textures for the whole body
• 2K textures for the teeth and the tongue
• 4K textures for the inner eyes
• 2K textures for the belt and the gloves
• 2K textures for the bandages (legs bandages and the right arm bandages)
• 2K textures for the leggings
• 2K textures for the underwear (Cheeky and the bra)
• 4K textures for the dress
• Baked textures (As said before, you can also change those baked textures into procedural materials to have a better quality) :
• 2K textures for the gold texture (Necklacen earings, shoulder armor, dreadlocks, gold things near her ponytail, lozenge bracelets)
• 2K textures for the ruby texture (ruby from the necklace and the other one from her belt)
• 2K textures for the hairs (black hairs, red hairs & the bicolor hairs [black & red])
• 2k textures for the eyebrown
• 2k textures for the eyelashes

This file has also a textured landscape (1 texture under 1K for the sand and 1 texture under 1K for the sandstone)

Finally, you have a smoke domain and two smoke emitters that are set to emit fireballs. The smoke emitter is the fireball (keep its render off because it is only used to precise the location of the fireball) and the smoke domain will limit smoke and flames from the fireball (make sure smoke emitters are inside the smoke domain) _Before rendering your blender project with fireballs, you will have to go in the smoke domain physics propreties and you will have to press free all and, then, you will also have to click bake all before rendering the animation. _

Moreover, you have access to 3 reference collections (one collection for hair reference, another for dreadlock reference and the last one to dreadlock gold attach and rubies). These collections are there as a bonus and can be reused and remodeled on other characters if these elements have interested you. Otherwise, you can delete these bonus collections.

Concerning the number of polygons, this character is a medium poly character.

• The character has a total of 148.481 vertices, 295.994 edges & 147.567 faces.
• The whole character (without hairs) contains 93.867 vertices, 187.439 edges, 93.625 faces.
• Hairs (wicks, dreadlocks, main hair & mustaches) of this character contains 54.614 vertices, 108.555 edges, 53.942 faces.

Fireballs (2 smoke emitters) have 84 vertices, 240 edges & 160 faces. 1 smoke domain has 8 vertices, 12 edges & 6 faces.

Landscape has 196.612 vertices, 391.684 edges & 195.076 faces (4 vertices, 4 edges and 1 face for the sand and the rest for the sandstone)

Concerning the number of bones, this characters contains 199 bones from metarig and is ready for animation. She has bones for feet, legs, hips, spines, shoulders, arms, fingers, face (eyes ; eyelids ; eyebrowns ; forehead ; lip ; nose ; mouth ; teeth ; tongue ; cheeks ; jaw), ears, hairs (main hairs ; ponytail ; mustaches ; wicks) & one for the dress.

She also has 20 pre made poses (you can also add new poses or modify poses already done as much as you want) :

• 1 pose with ears that are down
• 2 eyes poses (eyes closed & eyes half closed)
• 5 faces poses (angry-serious face, evil face, happy face, sad face & devious-maniacal face)
• 5 hands poses (crispy hands, thumbs up, hands controlling fire, hands lauching fire & closed hands)
• 4 idle pose (Lauching fire pose, thali menacing pose, thali walking pose & thali thumbs up pose)
• 2 mouth posed (mouth closed & teeth closed)
• 1 pose with the right wick coming after the shoulder armor (recommended to avoid overlapping of the shoulder armor and the right wick)

Concerning the animation, I rendered it in Blender, then, I used *Coolcut * (a video editing software) to change the speed of some moments in the final rendering.

In the **Blender_ThaliProject** folder, you will have access to :

• the blender file named [AfkArena_Thali] [version of the blender file : blender 3.3.1] alon with its python script AfkArena_Thali.blend11
• a folder for all baked textures
• a folder for UV textures
• a folder for reference images used for the modeling of Thali
• a folder for the sounds of the Thali animation (as well as the seperate tracks)
• a folder for the final animation of Thali (the edited one and one without editing)
• a folder for the 2 rendered pictures of Thali (Thali menacing idle with lit fireballs [One with procedural materials & other one with baked textures)
• a file of blender_assets.cats [blender file for the root directory of the asset library] along with its blender_assets.cats.txt~
• a file of waveletNoiseTile.bin [blender file used for fluids such as fire or smoke]

If you have any other questions about this project, feel free to submit them to me.