Hello again, one and all. Bayonetta modeling lead Kenichiro Yoshimura AKA Yoshi here.

For this blog entry, I wanted to do something a bit different from last time and give you an inside look at how I modeled the face of Bayonetta’s old fogey – Enzo. As much as I love creating women, there are lots of crazy bits to making an old fogey, so this is fun for me too.

First of all, before I work on any faces, I always make a rough sketch. Kamiya told me he wanted a designed based upon a few key words – an impish, Blues Brothers and Danny DeVito-esque, nouveau riche guy. My personal key points were a jutting jaw and a double chin.

With sketch in hand, its time to light the fire and kick the tires – Modeling time!

After putting hands to virtual clay, here’s what I came up with.

A little too cute, don’t you think? His eyes are really round and it seems like he would have a penchant for rice balls. (Note: This is a reference to the Naked General, Kiyoshi Yamashita)

Whenever I would show this to people, it would immediately spark laughter. Kamiya-san laughed as well, sparking a retake. Which lead to this:

This is how Enzo ended up. He’s got a big mouth, and by lowering his eyelids, his face ended up being nice and shady. From a side view, the line of his chin is quite slovenly, which I like. This version was more or less OKed, so I kept on working.

I added the wrinkles and jowls in Zbrush. Then we used this as bump information known as a normal map in the same way as I explained last time describing the making of Bayonetta.

Once I finished up the texture and got the feel of the surfaces down right, the model was done! Enzo is red-faced, making him seem like an old man up to no good. The mole on his right cheek was something I took so much pride in that I modeled it! …Only to have it covered up by his sunglasses.

Here is a full body shot.

His body shape is pretty much Humpty Dumpty. It’s cute in motion. His clothes are shabby and a little bit dirty.

You know what? Old fogeys are fun!! Enzo is a really interesting character in the game, so I hope you all definitely give him your undivided attention!

Finally, I wanted to answer a question I got last time asking if I was just leaving the polygons as quads. Yep. I leave them as quads. For models with polygon counts from the PS2-era and prior, it is true that we would manually break things into triangles to control bends on the model; however, with the number of polygons in current models, the amount of work that would entail makes it impossible. It would be literally be killer. Moreover, when modeling with Zbrush, if you have triangles, they end up distorting which makes things less than ideal.

Those two reasons are why we go with quads.

And with that, I bid you adieu!

(NOTE: Higher resolution versions of the images in this post can be found on the PlatinumGames Inc. Flickr Page)