Character
tutorial
This
is a tutoral showing roughly the steps from idea
to a finished realtime character. The tutorial is
based on the work we do for the Project
IGI game at Innerloop
Studios.
When
doing real-time characters for a game like IGI,
it's absolutely necessary that every design aspect
have been well thought through. From the very beginning
of designing a character, we have to make sure that
the result of this process is something that will
be kept in use for the final game. The first stage
of designing characters is inspirational words and
also for what reason we want this type of character
within the game, this creates a fundamental idea
for the artist to continue on. Here's an example
on how we created the "winter sniper" character.
1a/b/c:
click
on image to see fullsize
1a.
First of all there's a lot of studying on different
clothing design and pictures of different snipers
from books. We try to find as many references as
possible to make the creation easy, with as much
realistic aspects as possible. But before sketching
up the details, we want to get a clear idea on what
type of a person this guy is. Should he be heavy,
light, small, big, etc? As this guy is a sniper,
he sits a lot waiting and don't carry a lot of heavy
weaponry. So, naturally he shouldn't be too muscular.
But he's not a sprinter either, so an athletic body
wouldn't fit his character too well either. The
first rough sketch has been created to give the
basic shapes and proportions. 1b. Since the main
shapes have been decided, the more detailed design
is to come next. Shapes are better defined with
the help of a more delicate line work. Next the
design of his clothing and accessories evolves.
Since he is a winter sniper, he should have clothing
that looks like it can keep him warm. Additionally,
our character should be able to move his body well,
as he would lie on ground or crouched sitting positions,
aiming to keep his visibility to a minimum. 1c.
Now we choose the colors of his clothing according
to the environmental setting and how well camouflaged
we want him to be. We also need to decide which
colors and combination that will look good together.
So, this is in many ways a combination of esthetics
and functionality.
2a/b/c/d:
click
on image to see fullsize
2a.
After the final version of step 1 has been approved,
we start to create the character in 3D. Since the
concept design has been well thought through, it's
only work and no design from here on (some smaller
changes might occur), which makes the whole progress
of doing the in-game character less risky, with
less trial and error. Here the head is being drawn
in profile with lines. 2b. 2d-shapes are later extruded
to 3D and mirrored in order to make it easier to
see how the face will look like. 2c. From here,
all the polygonal work is purely manual, tweaking
every vertex to be as optimal as possible and flipping
edges of the polygons in order to get proper smoothing.
Also, it's VERY important from this stage on to
make sure the joints are modeled to work well with
the character's bones. This is done together with
the animator. 2d. When the mesh is done, we decide
how optimized it should be, according to how many
of this character that will be used in the game
at the same time. In this case the model consists
of ca. 500 polygons.
3a/b/c/d/e/f:
click
on image to see fullsize
3a.
Texturing! We usually detach all the different parts,
when texturing the character, to make it easier
to concentrate on one area at the time. In this
case we will show you an example of how to texture
the face. 3b. We use a tool that folds out the mesh
and creates a bitmap that shows the mapping coordinates
as lines. This is being done with every part of
his body. 3c. Then bitmaps are then imported to
Photoshop for texturing. A layer is created over
the bitmap and, the face is being painted on top,
carefully making sure that it matches the edges
of the bitmap underneath. Also, fine-tuning of the
mapping coordinates takes place simultaneously with
the texturing, to make sure there's no pixel stretching.
3d. The finished texture of the face. It's important
that the texture creates an illusion that the character-model
is a lot more detailed than it actually is in the
mesh and that it has a proper contrast-value. Sometimes
we scale up the textures and work with in a much
higher resolution, just to include the most important
details as good as possible. The end result is then
scaled down, as the maximum resolution for in-game
textures is 256*256 pixels. When scaling down the
texture the rough strokes looks highly detailed
and clean. It's also necessary to have a simple
light-source on the texture; because the light-source
in the game-engine will take care of the rest. 3e.
The result of the finished textured head-model.
3f. After repeating the same process on the rest
of the model, the character has been successfully
textured.
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4a:
click
on image to see fullsize
4a.
In order to implement the mesh to the game, the
bones has to be attached. For Project IGI we use
deformable bones, which means that vertexes are
being influenced from more than one bone. As we
attach the bones and set the envelope size of each
bone, some areas will work without further modification,
but most vertexes has to be modified manually so
that it will work perfectly with extreme bone positions.
4b. After the bones have been attached, the character
is ready to be animated. This sniper character is
one of the generic AI types, and will use the same
animations as most other characters. So, the only
difference is which and how many of generic animations
he will use, something that depends a lot on what
he is supposed to do and what abilities he's got.
Only individuality movements, such as walk, will
be added to this kind of character, which is a small
modification that gives much more personality to
the character. There are many ways to do this process,
and this is just on of them. Also, there are of
course many smaller challenges that can come up
throughout the creation, but these steps are the
basics and a very clean way to complete a character
from the beginning to the end.
click
here
for a final rendered walk cycle animation. (823kb)
Many
thanks to Joachim
Barrum, Mikael
Noguchi & Innerloop
Studios for allowing us to use this tutorial.
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