Behind The Scenes: Mandalorian vs. Ahsoka

I'm really big fan of Star Wars and I already made a lot of SW related illustrations. You can check out all of my Star Wars low poly artworks on Behance.

When I started to write these breakdowns, the main goal was to show you, where the idea begin and where I go for inspiration. This one is quite obvious and there is not much to explain. I watched the new season of Mandalorian and picked the scene I liked the most :) But I'm glad sometimes it's this easy. When something just throws a scene at you and you don't need to dig so deep.

But still, there were a lot of options in how I approach next Mandalorian scene. Do I want to create his ship in some environment? Do I want to go in detail, or just low poly? What about another cartoon character? I've decided to go with my traditional low poly diorama, because I sometimes really miss the simple artworks and I still didn't make a lot of cinematic scenes with my low poly characters, that I made specifically for this reason.

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The reference was quite hard to come by, since most of it was a TV show footage, and this one was quite fresh, so there wasn't a lot. At the same time, the scene was really dark and gloomy, probably due to a VFX budget reasons, so it's hard to make out the details.

So I've just gathered some basic Mandalorian and Ashoka reference and focused on creating their low poly representation and the looked up the cinematic shots to match the environment a little bit and the overall lighting and mood.

So the characters were pretty straightforward, I just needded to sketch them in some dynamic pose that I like and gives nice composition as a result. I wanted the weapons to meet in the middle, so I gave Mando the spear, even though he didn't have it at this point.

The other things, like the tree stump were just a result of me trying to create similar background, that I saw. And it's really complicated to create a trees in a low poly diorama with characters (scale issues, frame issues), so I defaulted to tree stump and focused on rocks and foliage.

You might notices, they have capes in the sketch, but none in the renders. And that's just me being lazy to create a working rig for the capes and skipping them altogether. In the end, I like it even more without them, since Ashoka's model gets to stand out a bit more.


And here are few insights from the modeling and rigging process :)

That wraps the insights for the cinematic Star Wars: Mandalorian illustration this week. Thanks for reading and I hope it will help you with some of your projects.

Cheers!