Concept Art-Style Alyx Vance

Early Half-Life 2 was a strange situation aesthetically speaking. It clearly drew heavily from dystopian films of the '80s-'90s like Dark City, Judge Dredd, Batman, Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Street of Crocodiles and The Matrix but in some regards never fully committed to that kind of heightened style - or the artists at Valve didn't fully grasp its tropes. One area this is evident is the design of sidekick Alyx Vance, which appeared to draw from anime (Ghost in The Shell comes to mind) in the concept art but by the time it was translated to 3D for the SIGGRAPH 2000 tech demo the result was rather feeble. Despite being conceptualized as Asian-African-American, the character spent a brief tenure as a Caucasian which can only be chalked up to a story-related detour (as her father was originally white, prior to having his story role supplanted by a black character in 2002).

This early design survived with some minor changes all the way until 2003 when a replacement was hastily constructed for the E3 2003 demo - and continued afterwards to be her definitive final appearance (slight changes due to Source Engine updates not withstanding). By 2003 the game had a markedly different style which was reflected in the grounded and correctly contextual final character designs.

I always found Alyx's old design to be fun in that camp '90s way, but the model itself wasn't particularly inspiring - principally because of the horrendously ugly and impractical jacket (why is there a big gap in the back?) and a host of other imperfections in the meshwork (early HL2 character models are infamous for bad meshes and worse rigging). To solve these problems I had two paths to take, either reign it to be more believable and practical or to push the other way and make it as ridiculous as possible. The latter choice was infinitely more exciting.

From her concept art I brought over her slightly darker skin tone, forehead tattoo, goggles and red hair. The volume of her hair in the concept art made me think of a 1980s-style backcombed look which eventually grew into quite a mane. Bigger is better. Despite all the changes I was keen to ensure it still had resemblance to the final game's character - so details like the necklace and shoulder tape were brought over from her 2004 model.

Because of all the mesh changes, I had to re-rig her to the ValveBiped skeleton from scratch. This wasn't a particularly fun experience but it did teach me more about nuanced weight painting which I had limited experience with (as I mostly work in Goldsoruce, which required fixed weights).

The final result was a late '80s glam rock/cyberpunk hybrid monstrosity. An ode to an incarnation of Half-Life 2 that never truly existed even back at the turn of the millennium.