Character art - The World of Lexica
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Hey all. My name is John DeRiggi, and I'm excited to share character art from The World of Lexica, an action-adventure educational game for the iPad created by Schell Games for Amplify Education Inc. This is a language arts game aimed at helping middle school kids to improve reading and writing skills, and it brings together characters from literature throughout the world. You can check out more info here on the iTunes App store!
Zbrush was a large part of our pipeline, not only for final asset sculpting, but also for concept sculpting, as well as polypainting and mask creation. We also used Maya, 3D Coat, XNormal, Photoshop, and Quixel DDO/NDO. The game was created using Unity. The sculpts I show here were rendered in Keyshot and the game models were rendered with Marmoset Toolbag 2.
A big thanks to my fellow character artists, Eric Montanari and Ross Kimball, who helped me to grow as an artist, along with our awesome concept artists, Ryan Yee, Zach Coe, Max Davenport, and Astro Leon-Jhong. Thanks to everyone else at Schell who also helped bring this game to life!
John
Baba Yaga, from Russian folklore
Cave Librarian NPCs
Zbrush was a large part of our pipeline, not only for final asset sculpting, but also for concept sculpting, as well as polypainting and mask creation. We also used Maya, 3D Coat, XNormal, Photoshop, and Quixel DDO/NDO. The game was created using Unity. The sculpts I show here were rendered in Keyshot and the game models were rendered with Marmoset Toolbag 2.
A big thanks to my fellow character artists, Eric Montanari and Ross Kimball, who helped me to grow as an artist, along with our awesome concept artists, Ryan Yee, Zach Coe, Max Davenport, and Astro Leon-Jhong. Thanks to everyone else at Schell who also helped bring this game to life!
John
Baba Yaga, from Russian folklore
Cave Librarian NPCs
Replies
General Jinjur, from the Oz series
Cadence, leader of the rebel librarians
Council Librarian NPCs
The Cat player-character options
The Yeti player character options
erroldynamic: thank you!
JadeEyePanda: because the game combines so many different cultures from literature throughout the world, there was no one set of reference really. It totally depended on the book character. For Baba Yaga, for example, she comes from Russian literature, so much was referenced from older, Russian women. General Jinjur is from the Oz series by L. Frank Baum, and her military garb is well described in the books. This is true for others as well. With NPC characters, their reference was based on their environments. So for the forest librarians as an example, leathers and linens that felt organic and handmade were important to show their connection with nature. Some of these may have been influenced by Eastern European styles as well.
toco: thanks very much!
I also updated the previous posts with a title for each character to provide a bit more context, along with a link to game in the iTunes App Store. Thanks again for checking it out!
Triangle count: most around 2300 tris - sculpted a high res asset then retopoed to create a low res game asset
Game Maps: diffuse, specular, normal. Normal and light maps baked from high res sculpt. A few characters have alpha (cutout - black and white only), but we tried to minimize that as much as possible since it is very expensive.
Map size: diffuse - 512, specular - 128, normal - 512. This differed a little based on the character type as well and how large the asset was on screen. NPC librarians only had a 128 normal map for example, but book characters, unique librarians, and player characters had 512 normal maps since they were more prominent.
Unity Shader and lighting type: BRDF shader combined with light probes that simulate the baked environment light maps reflecting onto the characters
The assets in the images here from Marmoset use the source maps at 1024. For more info and to see some of the maps, you can download this character model pipeline doc I made for the project. You can see a few of the 512 res game maps applied in Unity here as well.
Hope that's useful! Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks again!
John
Slosh: Thank you very much Satoshi! Nice Ygritte sculpt!
Ged: Yes, lots of animation, but only 1 lead animator and a part time contract animator. They both did a great job. Thanks for the kind words!
Dan!: Thanks man! Diggin' your Killjoy character on Art Station. Btw, I work with Ben Greene at Schell. Great artist and coworker!
Tobbo: Thanks very much Aaron!
Bolovorix: Thanks Zach! If you like the yeti, I have a fun one coming up next!
leecurt: Thank you!
nuclear angel and cesarinm7: Thanks very much for the kind words! My days are around 9 hours each, sometimes with only a 25 minute lunch, sometimes with a 1 hour lunch, just depends on how busy I am. The humanoids are around 2.5 - 3 weeks.
The player character animals range from 1 - 3 weeks depending on the number and complexity of the "armor" options and any body changes needed. The base player characters were made first, like most games that are similar to this, and they went through many iterations to land on the final base forms and details. Other sets then grew from this. The Dragon Gryph is a bit more complex, as the original body sculpt needed to change somewhat, and there were several "armor" options as well. The Curiosity Gryph had more armor options, no body sculpt changes, but a more complex texture overall. So it varied for them.
We created 2 editions of the game, one out December 2014 and the second out September 2015. It originally started around end of 2011.
asdaq: Thank you! It is definitely a challenge to squeeze effective silhouettes and animatable topology out of lower tri budgets. Thanks again!
I think the textures might be a bit over sharpened. and i think you should consider changing your approach for dark hair. especially on the last boy it looks like it is grey not black. I guess this is due to a convexity overlay or something. it just doesn't look right.
It is less visible on Tuppence Cowley, but still noticable. i think less contrast and more blending together of shapes with global instead of very local lighting would help with that effect.
neox: Thanks for the kind words and the feedback! They are definitely sharpened a good bit, especially since the in-game texture size in Unity is 512 (with mobile compression too) and our farther camera distances need that extra sharpen to pop well. These textures in the images are 1024 for presentation purposes in Marmoset. I'll definitely test it without sharpening for the next presentation shot though!
Similar reasoning is why the dark hair is a bit overdone - to get it to pop at our far camera angles. Without this, it just looks like a big dark blob on any character. The tradeoff is more unrealistic hair at closer cameras though since we had to use the same asset for any camera angle. Thanks again!