Radical Heights Characters and Look Progression

On Boss Key's final game, I was responsible for look dev with the Art Director, as well as working out the general character creation process with Tech Animator Randall Hess.
The overall goal was something stylized for better ease of creation, but have some visual appeal as well. Coming from my experience working on characters on Fortnite, I wanted to get a look that felt stylized but more adult that was really based from 80s hollywood.
We were very short on resources, but the challenge at arriving at a promising look was fun. We wanted to use a toon shader, but not have it overpower the normals, so one of the things I did to remedy this was to incorporate the curvature map in the roughness and the basecolor to some degree. This helped create a soft appearance. The topology allows for Uv based culling when cloth covers various sections of the body. Lastly, I wanted to show some of the lookdev progression as time went on. Hope you enjoy!
*LP contestant mesh made by Neil Pascarella