Gears of War 3: Ladie's Night :)
Hi Everyone!
I'm new to posting on Polycount, but I've browsed it over the years and I'm really impressed with the level of talent on this forum.
I wanted to share some work that I did on Gears of War 3. Being at Epic is quite an honor, because we're always trying to push the limits of the medium in which we work, whether it's technical, gameplay based, or artistic.
In any case, here's some shots of work. I primarily work on female characters and an occasional creature here and there. If there are any questions please feel free to ask.
Enjoy!
P.S. Be sure to check out Moose's (Maury Mountain) texture thread. Awesome stuff in there! http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90208
I'm new to posting on Polycount, but I've browsed it over the years and I'm really impressed with the level of talent on this forum.
I wanted to share some work that I did on Gears of War 3. Being at Epic is quite an honor, because we're always trying to push the limits of the medium in which we work, whether it's technical, gameplay based, or artistic.
In any case, here's some shots of work. I primarily work on female characters and an occasional creature here and there. If there are any questions please feel free to ask.
Enjoy!
P.S. Be sure to check out Moose's (Maury Mountain) texture thread. Awesome stuff in there! http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90208
Replies
Just one silly question, what's the average time you spend on a character of this level? Can you give an estimate time of each production's stage (modeling, uv, texture, etc)?
Those are spectacular. And specular.
Emphasis mine. Understandable considering you're working with a 6 year old hardware.
i really like that you added the white clayrenders.
anyway amazing work, these topics are an enormous inspiration
Sam wire too!
Thanks for the kind comments!
Its hard to see that it is a low poly character, amazing
one thing about that flying beast, im not sure if its good or bad but its so busy it takes me few min to understand where is what.. like eyes and mouth and like what the hell is that
but its amazing no matter what
thanx for the low wires too, was wondering how low are those..
looks pretty high compare to what i'v use to work with and that great!
thank you so much for posting, and sharing your wires, very inspiring
saw this on zbc already, really awesome work Chris, congrats.
SO
BAD
ASS
my only qualm is that the armor completely obstructs the view of the tig ol bitties
(except the last one and the pic with armor off
I wanted to answer a question that was asked regarding hard surfaces that might be helpful to others as well.
"Do you guys at Epic use zbrush for your base sub-d modeling or do you make it in some other package and then use zBrush for a sculpt pass?"
I depends on the choice of the artist, but generally we make high poly models in max, with a dent pass in zbrush, but occasionally hard surface objects are sculpted in zbrush from a low poly model made in max.
as an established and very popular franchise you have to understand these characters in terms of as audience surrogates. there are girls who like to play gears of war and wanted characters to play as that stood on equal footing with the rest of the soldiers, not weirdly tarted up simply because they were women.
very laudable that women characters are much more present in gow3 and in much more of a naturalistic fashion. come a long way seeing anya as a part of the main "troop" of playable fighting characters from the first game.
anyhow, ladies and monsters is a pretty good duty to be on, and you should be rightly proud of your contributions to the project. i think my favorite is the older woman with the dreadlocks, she was a really interesting character to run into in the game
I have a couple questions...
How did you do the mesh overlap on the armor?
I was wondering if you could share what the lowest sub-D of the sculpts look like?
About how long was spent on the modeling of a character?
thanks again!
-Oliver
Looks like they're all genetically blessed beneath that functional armour to me :P
- whoops see someone has beaten me to this question!
And the level of quality and detail on Myrrah blew my mind! Simply astonishing work.
The time varies, based on subject matter. I think the general estimate is 3 weeks for HP, 2 weeks for low poly and processing. Maybe a week for texturing.
Speaking for myself, I try to stick to that schedule, but in practice I often revise and revisit a model several times throughout the project. What I've found is that I can get 90% of the look I want on the first try, but the remaining 10% take a lot of work to make sure, as it's been mentioned in another post, that it feels less like a model and more like a person. Myrrah for example took about 10 weeks plus occasional texture polish. Here's a shot of the initial process before the body texture, but you may notice that the face changed a bit, because looking at it weeks later it didn't feel right to me.
When it's something like a creature, it's a bit easier to stick to the schedule simply because it does not have hair (which is very time consuming) and will like not have the same facial demands for Cinematics. that said, creatures are still very difficult because of the detail that is expected.
does that mean a total of around 6 weeks for 1 character?
To answer your questions about the inset pattern; it's actually pretty simple. Attached are a few images to explain it.
P.S. I'm really happy that folks seem to 'get it' when it comes to the aesthetic I was going for. We really wanted something that women would see and say "I'd like to play as her". In my experience, it was the balance of strength and beauty that was the most difficult. Happy you guys like!
I'm not working at your level of detail, but thanks for that, been thinking about time lately and felt like I've been working really slow.
But I have to ask; is there a reason why everything is modelled in subd/Scultp tool? like the meshing on the thighs, torso, etc.
Couldn't a lot of time have been saved, as well as perhaps better control by doing those details in Photoshop?
I did some test bakes to see the difference bettwen wire meshing done in subd and backed into a normal vs. the same mesh done in Photoshop using the bump filters and after resizing the Normal map to 512 I could hardly tell the difference, unless I zoomed in really close.
At 1024 there was a noticeable difference but again only if I zoomed in. I figured with all the other textures, that difference is probably negligable.
Anyhow, just wondering in general what the process is at a proffesional studio.