The Reaper: Death Incarnate

(There are more pictures if you keep scrolling down)

This is the Reaper: Death Incarnate. I made him for a game that I am currently working on with a friend of mine and all the content you see is completely original made from the ground up by me. The game is called Reap and Sow. It’s a single player RPG mob fighter where you play as the grim reaper and defeat celestial gods and the like. I created this model, rigged, textured, and animated it myself. I also created the Scythe that he uses and animated & textured it as well.  I also did all the camera work for the animation.

The sigil on his back is something I created from the use of two ancient symbols. The curved one with the prongs pointing up means "God", and the rounded one that looks similar to the omega symbol means "Death". Therefore the sigil means "God of Death".

Something I want to mention about him is the ribs-It may look as though I forgot to make a sternum, but I did not. This was a deliberate design choice to leave his ribs open. I plan to give him a "soul core" of some sort when I implement him in the game.

The scythe blade’s exaggerated look was a deliberate design choice. I wanted to give him that extremeness and exaggeration you get when you see weapons in anime. There are also many tiny skulls along the handle of the scythe.

The rig uses Ik (inverse kinematics) and damped tracks for optimization of animation to look smoother. To get the cloak to move correctly I used wiggle bones. A part of the rigging that was a little difficult was the hood and sleeves. I wanted them to follow the body while not twisting perfectly with them. To achieve this I used constraints to make a bone that keeps within a limited distance & rotation of a certain bone. This allowed the sleeves to not copy the arm movement directly while still following in the correct way. With the hood I limited the distance and rotation, but I used a wiggle bone so that the hood can ever so slightly shift during movements, as real hood would.

To make the trail I created a new noise texture to create it. Then I used geometry nodes to attach a trail object with that texture onto the scythe blade.

Check out the dev log below to read the story (WIP) for The Reaper