In 2022, I rejoined the team with significantly expanded expertise, having worked across several projects as a Senior 3D Artist in the interim. I returned to Skymill Studios as a Lead Character Artist Consultant, where I was entrusted with the large-scale initiative of overhauling the character creation system from the ground up — as well as providing documentation, art direction, and mentorship to junior and outsource artists on the project.

In this role, I designed and produced over 200 interchangeable avatar assets and architected a robust, modular system for both player character and NPC creation and generation — including the base player character models themselves. The system encompassed a wide range of customization options: multiple body types, facial features, hairstyles, and clothing items, each with their own sets of colorways.

A key focus of this work was maximizing customizability while maintaining optimal performance in-engine. One of the more impactful solutions I implemented was a color table texture system, which replaced the need for multiple large texture sets per colorway, with instead a single grayscale texture paired with small, pixel-sized color lookup charts. This approach significantly reduced runtime lag and drastically cut the volume of resources being loaded simultaneously — a critical optimization for a system with this level of combinatorial variety.

Beyond asset creation, I reshaped the project's 3D style system holistically — from high-level visual direction (silhouette language, texturing philosophy) to granular technical standards. This included developing proxy guides for clothing boundaries to ensure all garments could be freely mixed and matched, as well as hairline and blendshape guides to support dynamic hair adjustments when equipping hats and headbands.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to create several prominent, custom NPCs for the game's narrative — which was extremely fun and rewarding in and of itself.