yoo!! i was the one! they were not based of emojis however, but on miis!
it was the first time i wanted to make characters like this for a story, and don’t have so much experience in character design myself. luckily, using the mii editor for making the characters was so fun! i try to make miis out of them by how i think them in my head, and the end result are some pretty good mii renders I get to use as reference to draw them! i definitely recommend it!! :D
oh and thanks for the info on the camera!