Honoring Hollow Knight: Silksong With a Detailed 3D Recreation of Hornet

Introduction

Hey everyone! I'm Andre Kent, a Senior 3D Character Artist in games. I've contributed to a range of titles and teams, from a small contribution on League of Legends: Wild Rift, Character Lead on Hidden Leaf for Fangs, and a collab with Valve via the awesome PieTrap Studio for Dota 2.

Since my last 80 Level interview (my Ron Swanson Paladin breakdown in 2020), both the industry and my craft have evolved a lot. I've led more teams, collaborated with incredible artists, and streamlined my pipeline for faster look-dev and more consistent stylized results.

Silksong Fan Art

From Silksong's launch day, I was immediately hooked. I'm always inclined to make fan art of the games I'm super fixated on (if you've seen my portfolio, it's pretty recurrent). For one, it's fun to make a small tribute to the stuff we enjoy. I find that inspiration loves to hitchhike with passion, so leaning on the stuff we like as a little push is always a good source of fuel for short projects.

I tested out a few different approaches for Hornet. Some human versions with pointy Dracula-style hair to match her original sprite silhouette, some more leaning towards dark fantasy as if Hornet was some kind of Bloodborne kind of character, but it was Nicholas Kole's concept of Hornet that made it click for me.

I had made a Hollow Knight fan art back in 2020, and how cool would it be if my Hornet fan art kept to the same style and theme? Nick Cole's concept was the spark to push towards that direction. I tried hitting the same tone as the in-game sprite, but with a few key elements from Nick's concept and a few twists I wanted to add myself, so I got to work.

Workflow

My modeling started with a standard pass: rough blockout → Dynamesh Limbs → ZRemesher for a cleaner base → subdiv sculpt up to final detail (the body base peaked around–11M tris).

For the head, I start simple: cylinder and Bend Arc (ZBrush's "secret" Deformation/Transpose trick). Don't worry about the initial topo until after you finalize the deformation. Then a clean ZRemesh gives you a more sculpt-friendly surface.

For the cloak, I used plan folds at the lowest subdivision. Create strong zig-zag edge directions so each curve becomes a fold as you subdivide (you can preview it with Dynamic Subdivision). Its "pre-subdiv" structure survives polishing later when you need to add the folds.

For the thread spool, my wrapping trick: slice a cylinder into polygroups → Panel Loops to extrude each group into a thin "torus ring", then Polish, Move Topo, Pinch/Inflate for subtle variation so it feels like silk, not rope.

I'm a big advocate for reusing meshes and giving little nods to previous pieces. Because I made a little Hollow Knight fan art back in 2020 (my favorite game at the time), I felt it was only fair that I reference it somehow with Hornet, so I stole his little bug hands.

Originally, I didn't plan for Hornet to have a hand (her arms would end like her legs, on little pointy spikes, but it felt right to give her little fingers so she can play the Needolin. The brushes I leaned on were: DamStandard, GIOBrush, TrimAdaptive, Move, ZRemesher, and a lot of Lasso masking.

Topology & UVs

I made the entire retopology in Retopoflow in Blender. I find it to be super lightweight and efficient, so the entire retopology process took me just over 4 hours to complete. Not only is her body frame pretty simple, I already had a pretty good low-poly base for the cloak because of how I approach it in ZBrush, so hey, a good chunk of the retopology is out of the way already! All I needed was to delete a few loops and do a little cleanup. 

From early in the project, I knew I wanted to add the feathers to the inner side of the cloak, but due to the deformation, I knew it was gonna be a nightmare, so I thought making it into a tileable texture (for Normal Map, AO, and Height Map) was gonna do the trick.

To help me with the UV, I used the Mio3 plugin in Blender. It has some fantastic little shortcuts to make life easier when you need to square UVs, straighten them at an angle, stack them, or organize elements in a way that will make them easy to manage when you're dealing with Substance 3D Painter.

Texturing

Texturing in Substance 3D Painter is honestly one of my favourite parts. I made my own Substance 3D Material to help me abbreviate a few of the production processes, excessive layers, material consistency, etc.

I made it specifically to fit needs in texture quality, so I added terminator controls to the shadow, highlight points with dynamic blending modes, Thickness Map subsurface tones that can be set also to different blending modes, and even the ability to start the polypaint color base straight from ZBrush Bakes instead of having to break the model into a million layers.

Because I made this material, my Substance 3D files are usually 5 or 6 layers at most (when I use a single Material, that is). So Hornet was no exception here. I knew I wanted the cloak to look somewhere between a velvet and a hibiscus flower.

I think the most challenging layer was her head. Bright values are harder to balance with baked-in lights, and I always lean towards seeing her head as some sort of bone husk, so it has to be fine-tuned in a bunch of different ways. Luckily, Nick Cole's concept art was a great inspiration and really cut short the need to test out too many different processes, and I just aimed at it and gave it a shot.

The eyes are a thing as well. It could be super reflective or absolutely void and pitch black. None would look weird, per se, but I thought the sheen would add some sort of cuteness and highlight her bug features, so I felt it was a good direction to pursue.

For rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag 4. I tried a couple of skyboxes with a more moody lighting and allowed raytracing to do most of the work. Then I just brought in a key light and a rim light and called it a day. Sometimes simple works best, so it made sense to focus more on the presentation (pose and the many accessories, from the Silk Spool extracted out of the UI to the rosary strings and magnetite brooch).

Conclusion

All in all, the hardest part was figuring out how to translate the original Team Cherry's charming 2D Sprite from the game while retaining Nick's awesome vision and finding an interesting endpoint that didn't kill the original soul of the character. I've seen way too many Hornet hyper-realistic and human versions, and while those are super cool, I really wanted to land something that felt like a lens into the world of Pharloom through a stylized take, so being true to the original sprite remained the project's north star from the very beginning, and I'm quite happy with where it landed.

If any of this could be used as advice for beginners, I think something that a lot of artists tend to lose along the way in their careers and busy lives is to remind themselves of what makes a good character GOOD to begin with. If you strip it down to its smallest fragments, where is the uniqueness of that character coming from? It's very alluring to lose ourselves in fancy techniques and convince ourselves that we have to be more and more impressive in the stuff that we do, but in doing so, we shouldn't give up on the beauty of simplicity.

Nowadays, portfolios with impressive pieces are a dime a dozen, and I find it incredible that we have so many amazing artists in our industry, but I personally feel like strong design with a good presentation is really the heart of stylized art.

I try to keep reminding myself of that with each new piece because if I have the opportunity to do that from time to time, I know I'll keep loving what I do for a long time yet to come! And here are my final takeaways:

• Pre-plan structure (folds, tiling details, reuse), prototype color early, and keep your material stack principled so you can move fast without chaos.
• Iterate toward the final look ASAP (block color, rough lighting). Kill weak ideas and noise early. Commit hard to the promising ones.
• Build a personal smart material or template file. Your future self will thank you.

And always credit inspirations. Fan art is community, not conquest. Credits: Hollow Knight: Silksong by Team Cherry. Hornet concept inspired by Nicholas Kole.

André Kent, Senior 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine