How long does to generally take too..

Noth

How long does it generally take in a studio setting to create a lead character model, something in a next gen setting. Like Sam fisher from Splinter cell, or Cratos in God of War. I know there are a lot of variables, like iterations / changes, but say if things were to go smoothly.

Thanks. : )

CrazyMatt

1-3 months on average.

seth.

...finish typing the title

Crazy Matt is about as exact as I was going to be...I did hear that they were spending 4 weeks on just the heads for the last of us. The quality suggests that, but 4 weeks is a long time on just a head, and the internet love to exaggerate the hell out of things

Neox

usually you don't spend 4 weeks straight, you have to consider iterations on assets, redesigns, etc. it all sums up in the end.

seth.

Yeah I remembered it being without iteration etc which is why it stuck in my head so I went digging...found this reply, doesn't clarify much but gives the op a fair example

mike Knowland wrote:

Length of time varied massively.. getting Joel and Ellie up to their initial quality took many months, and then still had adjustments gone on throughout the whole project. Ellie's head and hair were redone post Ellen page incident.. I'd say that alone took a good 4 weeks. Once things were rolling though characters got a lot quicker to make, which was great because production sucks ! Character heads like James, Robert and Henry were just modified versions of Tommy. Likewise a lot of our other enemies stemmed from Joel. If we were really tight on pressure we could make a new head very quickly just changing facial shapes and textures directly in Maya. We only had 5 character artists in-house (Soa Lee, Jaehoon Kim, Adam Scott, Mike Syvmbersky) and then a lot of outsource at our disposal. Joel's beard alone took a good 2.5 weeks, but then after that we were making similar beards in under half the time.

lifted from here: zbrush central

Eric Chadwick

Also some info here
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryGameIndustry#Time_Estimates

JacqueChoi

In my experience, Main Character Models are a development mess with contributions coming from Marketing, Programming, Animation, and Game Design.


I'd say MOST of the games I've worked on required the Main character to be remade from scratch a few times during their development due to an added feature, a change in story, or the AD just getting sick of looking at it. In terms of simple 'modelling' it's 1-3 month.

I could be wrong, but I would almost account for the main character to be 'redone' roughly once per year of production.