Giant Heart
3D character design for Leonardo, taken from cinematic render to a fully playable game.
The Brief
Leonardo needed a hero character to prove its 3D tools could carry a project from concept to finished product, not just a single pretty render. We designed Giant Heart, a hulking highlander with a soft spot for a stray kitten, and built him out fully: turnaround sheets, materials, rigging-ready topology, and a cinematic sequence showing him in motion. Rather than stop at the film, the character was handed off into a small vibe-coded game, built and launched alongside the video, so the same asset had to hold up under real-time rendering as well as offline cinema-quality output.
From render to runtime
The film opens on Giant Heart in full cinematic detail, hair, fabric, and skin shading pushed as far as offline rendering allows, before pulling back to reveal the character's turnaround and construction. The back half shifts into actual gameplay: a stylised runner where Giant Heart dodges boulders and collects potions with the kitten riding along, built and shipped in parallel to prove the character could survive the jump from render to real-time.
The Result
A single character became two deliverables: a showcase film and a working game, launched together as proof that Leonardo's 3D pipeline could carry an idea all the way from concept art to something people could actually play.
Credits
Creative Team @ Leonardo
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