Introduction:

This tutorial will take you through all the necessary steps to create and develop a character for Unreal Tournament 2004 using the Unreal Engine 2 that comes with the game. I will walk you through each step from concept design, an overview of low-poly modeling, un-wrapping, texturing, rigging, animating, and importing your character into Unreal Tournament. I will be using Autodesk’s 3ds Max 9, Adobe’s Photoshop CS2, Unreal Editor 3.0, and a few 3 rd party applications that I will mention along the way. Since you will be listening to my bad jokes and ramblings throughout this tutorial, I want to hear some feedback from all of you! I have a website that I am consistently updating and morphing into my own online portfolio with more tutorials, 3D models, graphic art, concepts, and some cool links. You can check it out here. My email can also be found here.I am always interested in hearing newer and faster ways to do things. So please email me with any questions or comments, I will do my best to help out. (My parents are both teachers, so I guess it runs in my blood.) Anyways, let’s go to work!

Concept Design - Intro:

Every good Diet fallows the basic food pyramid. Without a strong foundation the rest topples over no matter how well the other parts are proportioned. The foundation of the “character design pyramid” (I need to copy write that!) is made from countless hours and love spent engineering a well proportioned character on paper. Take time to draw your character out at different angles and get the feel for it. Do not go into much detail at first because no matter how good it looks, if the proportions are wrong, you are going to get a very messy and unappealing character. If you do not take time on this step your project will be doomed from the beginning. (Unless your perception of anatomy and art are exemplary) (…and if you suck at drawing, practice your brains out, because if you don’t, you are in the wrong profession. I hate hearing the excuse, “But I can’t draw.”)

As you can see, each layer relies on the previous layer for stability. Proving my point that if you build a good concept or foundation for your character, you will have a much better starting point for building the rest of it. Also, if you take a closer look, you will see that spending time on your low poly model is much more important than starting with a very high poly model. This is why I believe that low poly modeling is the hardest art form to master. Capturing the look and feel of a model while using the least amount of polygons possible is an art form in itself. If you start with a high poly model it can be difficult to change the overall flow or look of your model because you have so many loops and polygons to worry about. Detail modeling is when you spend some time inside of a program like mud box or z-brush, adding the small details like wrinkles and cuts. This kind of modeling should be spared for the end and should not be overworked. There is a fine line between adding detail and making your model look too overworked. (Have you ever looked at character models in Elder Scrolls Oblivion? Yea, my point exactly) Don’t get me wrong, these programs are amazing if you can use them properly, or your engine supports Normal mapping, which our engine can not. (I can’t wait for Unreal Engine 3!) Now that we know how the pyramid works we can start developing concept designs.

Concept Design - Getting Started:

When I am designing a character I like to draw him a few times. The first drawing I do is a perspective view to get the look and feel for the character. Then I fallow up with front and side views of the entire character and its head. I will be using these as reference inside of Max, so it is important that proportions are correct and line up between the drawings. It will make your life much easier once you start modeling, so take some time to get it right! The picture below demonstrates what I am talking about.

Now that you are keeping in mind, the value of proportions, we can start drawing out the views I was talking about earlier. Please proceed in drawing out a ¾ view of your entire character, then fallow up with his front and side views for modeling reference. After that, you want to have a separate front and side view for its head. I do this because a person playing your game will first notice the face of your character, because it is natural for the human eye to go there first. (Unless you are designing Laura Croft!) Below are my concept sketches. (Yes, he has two hands; one just got cut off on the scanner)

Concept Design - From Paper to Photoshop:

Now that we created the concepts, we are going to set up our drawings in Photoshop so that we can start painting them and get closer to a finished product. To do that we obviously need to scan them in. Scanning them in is easy, but keeping or creating quality of the lines is very difficult, unless you know a few tricks! Once we scan the images into our computer, I usually go into Photoshop and clean up any of the obvious mistakes that I made on paper. After you do this you will notice the lines are very pixilated and different shades of grey from the scanner instead of a nice solid black line like you were hoping for. To fix the color and contrast of your lines click Image > Adjustments > Levels and move the middle button as shown below. Then click OK.

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You can see that the contrast of the image rose greatly. This is so that the black lines stand out a little bit more. This step is very necessary to get a good product from our next step in which we will be using Flash MX 2004. In our next step we will be changing these very shady lines into sharper and smoother lines that flow very well together. If you have ever watched any of the new cartoons on cartoon network these days, you can see the solid black flashy line types used by the artist. This is kind of the look we are going for.

Concept Design - From Photoshop to Flash and Back Again:

The next thing you want to do is save your image out of Photoshop as a Jpeg. Open up Flash and “Create a new Flash Document.” The size of the document is not important; we are simply using Flash as a tool. Now that flash is ready, click File > Import > Import to Stage > and find your Jpeg that you saved out of Photoshop. Once it is in your document it should already be selected. Now go to Modify > Bitmap > Trace Bitmap. From this point I have no idea what values to type in for area and threshold. I usually just play with them until I get a look that I like. You can see what I used in the diagram below.

Now that you have the desired look, we will want to get this image out of Flash and back into Photoshop for coloring. To do this, click File > Export > Export Image. Then save your file as a Jpeg where you can find it easily (Better yet have a folder saved for this project, because being well organized is a great habit to get into, especially when you work with computers and work with a lot of files.) Please take some time at this point to get rid of any unwanted lines or marks made from the flash process in which you didn’t like. Because after this point we are done working with the line art and giving some life to our character with color!

Concept Design - Photoshop Basics :

Just like in every program, there are tools that are used 90% of the time and are the most helpful. I will show you what tools I use and how I use them. First we have to make a new Photoshop document. This will have to be very high resolution since we are taking in our final line art to color. Set your height and width to whatever you want; just make sure it is big enough to handle your new Jpeg you made in flash. I go pretty big because you never want to scale a picture up in size because it will lose quality. It is also very important to have high resolution in your new document. I use 300 DPI, you may want to go bigger if you want it to be very high resolution. Below are the settings I am using for my image. Click File > New.

Before we start Painting I want to cover the basics. I am not a pro at painting in Photoshop, but my techniques seem to work just fine. Below are the basic tools I use.

Concept Design - Painting with Layers :

So now you should have your Photoshop Image (the Jpeg we exported from flash) set up in a high resolution document which I talked about earlier. Now we will bring him to life by painting some color into him. Go crazy and have fun with it! When painting in Photoshop you have to get used to using layers. Each layer holds its own properties of whatever you have done in it. I use the Bottom layer to hold my line art. Next I create a new layer above the line art layer, change it from ‘normal’ to ‘multiply’ and Use the Paint bucket to fill it in with the basic colors in this new layer you just created (do not paint in the layer that is holding your line art). Now create a new layer that is set to multiply and add the first layer of shading using the same color. For each new layer you make, that layer should also be set to multiply. Each of these new layers you should not need to change the color. Since it is set to multiply, layers above other layers will in fact multiply the darkness of the original color used. Below is a diagram of how I use multiple layers to add shading on top of each other.

Concept Design & Modelling Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Unwrapping & Texturing Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Rigging & Importing Page 9 Page 10 Page 11