TL;DR you can prototype and evolve your characters using Onyx in your Tetra project and adjusting its properties to generate a fully rigged, textured character ready for gameplay in minutes. Keep reading if you actually want to understand how complex character creation is in a virtual world.
In the early days of gaming, character design was rudimentary, often limited to pixelated sprites or basic polygons in titles like Super Mario Bros. or early Tomb Raider, with minimal animations due to hardware limitations. These relied on hand-drawn frames or simple joint deformations, but lacked depth in personality or interactivity, as rendering diverse avatars demanded heavy manual artistry without modern tools. By the 2000s, AAA studios like Blizzard and Naughty Dog elevated designs in MMOs and action-adventures, incorporating motion capture and layered textures that taxed workflows, as the complexity of creating persistent, customizable characters required balancing artistic vision against the computational load of real-time rendering in shared environments.
Limitations across devices, particularly mobile, heighten these demands, as reduced GPUs and energy constraints curb the sophistication of character rendering. On desktops, detailed shaders execute fluidly, but mobile browsers enforce optimizations, mandating lower poly counts or simplified animations. WebGPU in Tetra offers relief with efficient pipelines, yet inconsistencies in adoption—such as partial support in some browsers—necessitate adaptive strategies, like compressing textures or curtailing shader complexity to uphold performance without diminishing core interactions. Examination of character dynamics reveals nuances like skeletal animations propagating through hierarchies, blend shapes for facial micro-expressions, and masks to avoid rendering artifacts inside meshes. Animations use forward kinematics with damping for natural motion, while blend shapes interpolate vertex positions for emotions. Character masks leverage stencil buffers or depth tests to clip internals, preventing visual errors like exposed wireframes, preserving immersion with low computational cost. The avatar system itself is included in Tetra’s rendering pipeline for design workflows, leveraging WebGPU's capabilities to apply AI-generated adjustments universally. This means parameters such as proportion scaling, texture variations, and animation blends are handled natively within shaders, triggered by property settings. And you can benefit from this abstraction, as no custom code is required to adapt the system for different archetypes or styles; the engine's node-based materials ensure compatibility, with automatic propagation of data through the compute graph.
The visual elements of character design, including silhouette, color palette, and exaggeration, play a huge role in crafting visually appealing and memorable avatars, complemented by anatomical considerations for coherence and expressiveness. Silhouettes provide instant recognizability, distilling the character's essence into a bold outline that conveys posture, personality, and narrative role for approachable heroes—ensuring the design reads clearly even in low detail or from afar.
Let's take a look at one of our Azimals heroes, Itsomay. Every character starts with a backstory, a trait and a home of origin. In Life, we have districts and we picked each hero's breed that would be a perfect fit. From the whitepaper, you'll learn that Itsomay comes from Pantera - a majestic realm dominated by dense jungles and roaring rivers, where the elusive jaguar reigns supreme. Legends speak of the jaguar as the guardian of the jungle, with the ability to move between the worlds of the living and the spirits. The land is a tapestry of ancient stone pyramids and sacred groves, waiting to be explored by the brave-hearted. Obviously, we picked a jaguar as the animal representing this district. We have three classes for characters to pick from to enable smart functionality: land, water and air. As its main trait, Itsomay has strength and together with its story of origin, we have a rough idea of what this character should resemble.
Born under a blood moon, Itsomay mastered the skull-crush as a child, merging with jaguar spirits after battles. As Shadow Death, he shatters bones in rituals, his roar paralyzing foes in jungle ambushes. Strong, fast, stealthy and intimidating are the key ingredients here.
Creating a humanoid muscular jaguar character in game development starts with diving deep into research on jaguar anatomy, mythology, and anthropomorphic styles to build a look—like mixing the cat's sleek, strong physique with a human stance for an agile, predatory hero. From there, usually concept art or mood boards takes shape through sketches that play up the muscular build, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and cat-like touches such as longer limbs and a balancing tail, exaggerating features like big paws for that intimidating vibe, all tied together by a palette of rich blacks, yellows, and spotted patterns to capture stealth and power.
Now normally, next would come high-poly sculpting in a very expensive 3D modelling tool, where you fine-tune the details: rippling muscles, textured fur, and a face full of expression using blend shapes for growls or stealthy creeps, while keeping the proportions practical for in-game actions like climbing or fighting. But with Onyx, our helpful AI assists you by creating your base low-poly version in minutes, along with UV mapping and basic texturing, rigging the skeleton with extra joints for the tail and ears, adding physics for things like swaying its tail or subtle muscle flexes, and early animations test out moves like sprints or idle poses. Wrapping it up, you plug it into the Tetra engine, test for smooth performance, and tweak based on how it handles the environment — to end up with a standout character that really pulls players in. From there, you can easily improve the prototype to evolve with Onyx, while still have the ability to manually sculpt and enhance as with Infinity SDK and Onyx, you have direct access to the Blender format during development time.
Color palettes enhance emotional depth and thematic alignment, using harmonious schemes to evoke moods—like vibrant primaries for energetic protagonists or muted tones for mysterious figures—while balancing contrast for visual pop and cultural symbolism to reinforce backstory. Exaggeration amplifies distinctive traits through disproportionate features, such as oversized heads for cartoonish charm or elongated limbs for dramatic flair, making characters stand out and memorable while avoiding realism's constraints to heighten expressiveness. Anatomy ties these together with proportional accuracy tailored to style, ensuring believable deformation during animations via proper muscle flow and joint placement, while shape language integrates organic forms for fluidity, resulting in designs that are not only aesthetically engaging but also functional in gameplay contexts. Character rendering incorporates specialized techniques, including subsurface scattering for skin realism, achieved through custom passes that reference depth-aware methods from prior wetness and aquatic implementations. A ShaderPass layers light diffusion beneath surfaces, applying glow and color shifts for organic translucency while maintaining sharp details above, ensuring cohesive embodiment. The use of decals and character-deforming objects enables local modifications to designs, such as scars from impacts, combined with special custom ShaderPasses for visually pleasing effects. Decals project texture overlays on affected areas, while deformers warp the mesh via displacement maps; ShaderPasses then layer distortions and highlights, fusing these with global simulations for stunning, unified characters.
In Tetra, the integration of AI-assisted - through Onyx - design and character features is streamlined for base archetypes, ensuring seamless application without extensive developer intervention. All predefined avatar templates incorporate depth textures by default, generated during the initial render pass and accessible in post-processing stages. This setup allows custom ShaderPasses to sample property values automatically, modulating anatomy and expressions to align with Onyx AI computations.
Keep in mind that traditionally, sculpting a custom humanoid muscular jaguar character from scratch in a professional game development pipeline typically spans 4-5 days, focusing on high-poly detailing to capture intricate fur patterns, rippling muscles, and feline anatomy with exaggerated features for visual impact, as evidenced in fantasy character workflows where this stage forms the bulk of initial modeling time. Rigging follows, usually taking 1-2 days to construct a skeletal hierarchy with extra joints for the tail, ears, and flexible limbs, incorporating skin weights for natural deformations during movement and ensuring compatibility with animations like prowling or leaping. Texturing adds another 2-3 days, applying PBR maps for spotted pelts, glossy eyes, and subsurface scattering on skin to achieve lifelike depth, often involving hand-painted details or procedural generations to blend humanoid and animal traits seamlessly. And definitely not last is the optimization which rounds it out in 1-2 days, through retopology to reduce poly counts, UV unwrapping for efficient texturing, and LOD creation to maintain performance in game engines, resulting in a total timeline of 1-3 weeks depending on complexity, revisions, and team expertise for a polished, game-ready asset. But if you have done your research, with Onyx and the Infinity SDK, you are able to get started in minutes and be able to be finished in hours or days - depending on your own time invested.