Ingame Characters for last Project
polycounter lvl 6
hey,
this was done for my last project as a lead character artist.
After more than 10 years i'm not working at Blue Byte anymore - i'm looking forward to new challenges.
responsible for the style, look, pipeline, consistency and the many outsourcing partners we worked with there was not much left that i have done myself from scratch. so i'm happy to show you at least a few characters. neox has already posted his stuff - he did a big bunch of them with his co-workers.
the style was very clean and cartoony to support our squash and stretch animations.
big thanks to christian nauck, who did nearly all of the character concept art. you can see his incredible work on his blog:
http://sketchfu.blogspot.com/
Zoe:
done for the dialogue sequences (chars have some more tris than ingame figures). just did the head - body was not done by me! props go to the guys from art-coding. i just did some polishing:
Ramirez:
first prototype character as a style test, which was used for the dialogue sequences also.
Different ingame characters (up to 1000 tris painted on a 1024² map for each of them):
Horse:
nude horse which was used as a basis for all horse models.
let me know what you think
this was done for my last project as a lead character artist.
After more than 10 years i'm not working at Blue Byte anymore - i'm looking forward to new challenges.
responsible for the style, look, pipeline, consistency and the many outsourcing partners we worked with there was not much left that i have done myself from scratch. so i'm happy to show you at least a few characters. neox has already posted his stuff - he did a big bunch of them with his co-workers.
the style was very clean and cartoony to support our squash and stretch animations.
big thanks to christian nauck, who did nearly all of the character concept art. you can see his incredible work on his blog:
http://sketchfu.blogspot.com/
Zoe:
done for the dialogue sequences (chars have some more tris than ingame figures). just did the head - body was not done by me! props go to the guys from art-coding. i just did some polishing:
Ramirez:
first prototype character as a style test, which was used for the dialogue sequences also.
Different ingame characters (up to 1000 tris painted on a 1024² map for each of them):
Horse:
nude horse which was used as a basis for all horse models.
let me know what you think
Replies
Great work!
It looks like there may be some unused space in the texture sheets. I don't know much about character art, so was there a specific reason for this, or was that just easier for the artist to paint?
I noticed this too but didn't want to mention it since there could be a good reason.
Maybe it's so all UV shells are a matching texture density. Even if it is just wasted space, doesn't look like the final models suffer much!
about the waste of texture space some of you asked - you are right, it is wasted
this was the workflow for the chars, maybe it explains the wasting space:
most chars have their own texture page. we have nearly 70 individual chars and some variations.
men are seperated into three bodytypes, thin, thick and strong.
priority was that all have the same pixel ratio.
i have created the nude body model and skin texture for every bodytype, so it could be used as the base for putting clothes on them and leave the nude parts as they are for consistency issues. so it was not allowed to scale the parts a bit more to use the space more efficient.
some guys have many asymmetrical parts and accessoires, so they use the texture to the max - other don't have. of course we could use the texture of simple chars more efficient, clone symmetrical parts and change the folds a bit or add some other gimmicks just to fill every hole. but for a game that is mostly played from a bird eye view and has so many characters on the screen, the additional amount of time would not be justified. at the beginning we also had plans for merging chars on bigger textures, using the space for head variations or maybe their tools.
finally we left the textures as they were without filling the holes for different reasons (time, technical issues....).
Really great work too! Love it.
but that horse stands out as particularly well done
I am not trying to undermine the quality of the work (they really look great!!) but I am just curious of whats going on on the larger res shots. Or maybe everything is strongly painted in as directional stage lighting ? Maybe its even 100% self illum ? I dont see how the boxy jawed characters could look as clean in a game as in your screenshots.
Thanks if you can help me wrap my head around it all! Just a bit confused here! hehe
nice work MFTituS btw!
ZacD: nope, just beauty renderings, sorry
P442: jepp, you are right, the hair is sometimes a bit plain. but i did it on purpose to make the face more pop out. nevertheless it is something that i could improve, thanks!
pior: you don't have to appologize - asking and beeing critical is a good thing
these are all beauty shots. i can't reconstruct the ingame settings because we used different shaders, lighting techniques, the characters had a different setup than their ingame world to make the best out of these few polys. we used normal maps and more advanced stuff for most of the other assets - but not for the figures.
so here are some screenshots out of max that hopefully explain your shading confusion:
due to the low polycount the shading will not look very good on the models. and without proper skinshader and other stuff it would not be easy to give the chars a lively look. strong shading would destroy the colours and it would be hard to achieve a lively look. so i tried to avoid strong ingame shading and paint all necessary information into the texture to support color behavior and let the texture do the work. this will look most of the time fine because our world has a constant sun direction from top and cube ambient lighting.
to get rid of the rough shading gradients (interpolated vertex shading) that just makes the colour muddy, we tweaked the normals on some parts for better shading behavior as you can see on the face (stronger facial planes).
e.g.: i want a redish bounce light on the bottom of the nose. dark shading would just make the colour grey. so i painted it into the texture and adjusted the normals so the planes will get light from top/ front. this results in less shading and more of the redish painted texture is visible. not very flexible under different lighting setups but works fine for our purpose
and for the boxy head planes -> we used chamfered edges on nose and the side of the face, so we have additional normals that we can tweak. it is similar to a different smoothing group, but with better control of the edges. smoothing groups have too harsh edges which don't look natural.
and we can paint a more saturated edge on the chamfered plane which would be impossible with smoothing groups.
on the bottom right you can see the tweaked normals (all green ones).
tweaking normals takes 10 minutes and can improve the shading for such a low polycount. don't know if any other games have used them.
hope it makes sense to anybody....