Modular Knight Characters

Finalhart

Hey everyone, I've been working on this project for a while and decided that it would be very beneficial for everyone if i keep track of my progress here. It's about making modular characters for the game we are working on: Knights of Azariah. The idea is to have an army of customizable characters using Blueprints to change the way they look on real time. Also since we are a small studio is the best for us to create multiple variations if we want to populate the world.

Since this is my first time working on modular characters I would love to hear your experiences if you have some, I'm a big fan of MMOs so working on this project really excites me, also critiques are always nice Polycount rocks!

So first of all, some quick HP renders to have fun after a lot of work:







Here is a quick shot of all the subtools, I need to make sure all of them are swapable and fit the UE4 Mannequin proportions.


Here are some shots in UE4 with normal maps only, I still need to finish some parts but depending on the tests I would have to group them differenty to make them work properly with the Rig and Blueprint system.









Also, some shots from the planning I made. Having more than 60 meshes can get really messy if you don't stay organized. They all have their pivot on the same location, so I can easily swap pieces just like @Skankerzero did in this project: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/SkankerzeroModularCharacterSystem

The idea is to also be very flexible with the Materials, so writing things down can save you time, It won't always work as expected but is better than just jumping  to the computer.



Will update you guys with more stuff soon!

Finalhart

Worked on a Greatsword this week, not really related to the character progress but can't imagine him without holding a weapon.

Finalhart

So... There really isn't much of a "progress" but they had to be remade so they can work as intended. Mostly technical stuff related i want to share with you guys.

The old setup separated the the mesh uv islands in "Materials" so we can have the best look inside the UE4. However this created an impossible setup and we decided to work them like if it were an MMO, so the character parts are:

-Head
-Breastplate(Chest and abdomen)
-Legs(Legs and boots)
-Arms(Arms and gloves)
-Shoulderpads
-Accesories (Will explain later)
-Cloth (For APEX)

Just like you would see in any MMO, you can't just change all the parts, like Aion:



The accesories are just extras for the model to make changes on the silhouette and make them unique like the hood or sabaton accesories. They are all grouped in a save UVset so they can create unlimited variations.

We basically several types of variations for each category, just like any other MMO when you change the legs of the character it changes to a different mesh. That give us a total of:

4 Helmets
6 Breastplates
6 Legs
12 Arms
13 Accesories: 2 for the head, 3 belts, 3 belt buttons, 3 Tasset, 1 Back "Tasset", 1 Sabaton accesory.
4 Cloth for APEX



The idea is to make the possible combinations since we can't change all the accesories on real time since not all of them can be just attached to a socket. This is an example of a complete character using all the Categories:


Each Category Type has different maps and they share the same ID color map, this map uses only RGB values, the reason I don't want to put random colors is because they can be manipulated inside the Material Editor as a Mask. Later in Quixel I will create all the detail masks to use in the Material Editor, but this one helps me to change the Materials like: Bronze Breastplate, Gold abs, Leather neck.



And inside Unreal, with normal maps applied they look like this:



And for now, these are all the meshes used to create the characters, once our technical artist finishes with the skinning process I would love to show you how they are working with the Blueprint system to change parts