Toon Shadin'

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a great game. And, recently, I started wondering what that game's rendition of Link would look like in the more modern, cell shaded, three-dimension style you'd see in something like ​Breath of the Wild.

The image to the left is how Link appeared in Zelda II's manual. I worked up some character sketches based on this image that I could create a model from, which can be seen below.

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As opposed to Link's more recent console look, the early Zelda  games have a really unique visual identity for their protagonist. In particular, Link is a lot leaner here, his hair is very shaggy, and his ears are much more upright. He also has very oval eyes and a long, cylindrical nose. An interesting part of this little exercise was seeing what would translate into 3D well, and what I would have to tweak.

This is where I wound up with the project. I ultimately decided to forego the lines in the original illustration since modern Zelda games don't include lines in their cell shading, but I think the two-tone toon shader is a nice replication of the colors from the drawing! 

There are definitely still some things I'd like to work on a bit more (should I ever pick this back up). The model is a pretty dense mesh that could stand to be optimized (though the topology is pretty sound). I also found that the hair in the illustration was extremely difficult to translate straight to 3D, so I might take another stab at that someday. And, little details like the cross stitching on the shirt's collar and lashes around the upper lid for definition would be ideal. Still, I think this offers a solid base, and I'm satisfied to get an idea of what a 3D Zelda II could potentially look like.

Oh, and just for kicks, I also modeled out the game's first boss, Horsehead. Didn't get too far into the texturing phase, but I think this gives a pretty solid idea of where things could go!