Sea of Thieves - Character Art
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Way back at the Start of Sea of Thieves development, we were tasked with the Design brief that the characters should allow you to "Be the pirate you want to be"...no small feat, when every player will want something different when they hear that!
To give us this ability, as Lead Character Artist, I spearheaded the Character Art team at Rare to start building the Infinite Pirate Generator. 4 years of blood, sweat, late nights, failed Autobacks, lots of swearing and MILLIONS of manually snapped vertices I can show you the results. This was a huge collaboration between multiple departments, from Character Art working closely with our uber talented Tech-Art team, through to Engineering, Animation and UI.
Enough waffle...here's some tasty images!
NPCs from the Infinite Pirate Generator
NPCs from the Infinite Pirate Generator
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Gender, Ethnicity, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Ethnicity, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG Characters: A range of body types
IPG Characters: Initial IPG Maya side head tests
IPG Characters: Initial IPG Maya side head tests...the VERY beginning of the journey!
To give us this ability, as Lead Character Artist, I spearheaded the Character Art team at Rare to start building the Infinite Pirate Generator. 4 years of blood, sweat, late nights, failed Autobacks, lots of swearing and MILLIONS of manually snapped vertices I can show you the results. This was a huge collaboration between multiple departments, from Character Art working closely with our uber talented Tech-Art team, through to Engineering, Animation and UI.
Enough waffle...here's some tasty images!
NPCs from the Infinite Pirate Generator
NPCs from the Infinite Pirate Generator
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Gender, Ethnicity, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Ethnicity, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG generated Characters: Mix of Body Type, Facial features and Facial accessories
IPG Characters: A range of body types
IPG Characters: Initial IPG Maya side head tests
IPG Characters: Initial IPG Maya side head tests...the VERY beginning of the journey!
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Each body size, and accompanying head shape has a different normal map and they get blended together depending on the "weight" of the body. We do the same thing with certain facial features- when they get picked, we mask a unique normal map on to enhance the shape. Again, with age we overlay a normal map on to bring some wrinkles on top of all that. Lots of layers of mesh and textures playing together basically!
Just thought I'd post some images of the Character Style Development that I was involved with on the project. I always love seeing behind the scenes pics from other projects so thought I'd repay the favour
It's great looking back and seeing how the style crystallized from quite loose concept images into something much more cohesive.
The first 3D Character Asset- used for an internal demo
Paintovers of initially generated heads
Initial 3D sculpting style tests for the hair
Taking this style and applying it to characters from our E3 2015 trailer
The base male body. All characters are derived from this mesh so it was important that it was 100% perfect!
The base male head
And much respect goes out to you for all your hard work on the characters, they turned out great!