How we create our characters
Following the #gamedev hashtag on Twitter, I realized we see lots and lots of great game developers (designers, programmers, artists) post their day-to-day progress, and it's great! Yet it is rather difficult to get a "big picture" view. It's especially true for newcomers to the indie scene, who might be wondering "How long would it take me to make a game?" or "how should I proceed to create 'X'?".
Our Art Director Dan recently shared with me the whole process for creating a unit in The Ember Conflict. On each character, three different artists would be involved: 2D artist, 3D artist and animator. I'll be using our newly unveiled Phalanx to illustrate the process.
Our concept artist Diego Candia has a knack for creating amazing characters.
In the very first stage Diego takes the basic idea of what the character will be (in this case "an uber-tanky unit with two shields, that can move like a wall and protect other units") and come up with various ideas.
After a few rounds of feedback from Dan, the concept is refined, and the character gets its final look.
At this point, Diego would usually paint a few color concepts. This helps Dan to make a final decision on the direction he wants to take. Some times though, when it's already clear enough, this is not needed.
This is one of the most important documents Diego creates.
It helps our 3D artists to match his model to the concept art as closely as possible. This sheet is imported into their 3D program to match up anatomy and scale.
A few steps are involved in the creation of the final 3D model.
The 3D artist (Dan or Dayantha) first builds a base mesh. This is a practice that Dan picked up in his previous jobs, as it allows him to match up the geometry perfectly to the concept. It also gives a nice clean model, on which the zBrush details will be attached to.
This mid-poly model is usually around 3000-4000 polygons [triangles], which gives plenty of detail to sculpt in zBrush.
The next step is to create the UV Map. It's much harder to create a clean UV Map with a high resolution mesh, so it's better done now. One thing you might have noticed: since the character is symmetrical, deleting half of the character and only UV Mapping this area gives more texture space for cleaner textures later on. As you can see in the picture above, only half of the face/body/arms/shields are visible on the UV map.
The next stage is to add details to the character by sculpting on the base mesh made previously. Most of the time it is easier and faster to separate the model for this step, ie. sculpt the body separate from a weapon. zBrush is an amazing sculpting tool, and adding those details is really what brings our character to life. A shadow map is then created from this sculpt, and applied to the mid-poly mesh created before.
Final steps: Color map and optimization
The color map is the most important part of low-poly game modeling. You can have a great model, but without really great and well-lit textures it will feel unnatural. This is the step where you need to fake everything (shadow, light, glow, specular) and make the character as lifelike as possible with no lighting. A few things worthy of note here:
The texture looks like it has lighting and shadows. The shadow map created earlier helped with this.
Little touches like extra shadows and small highlights help to pop out the details
The texture is constantly checked on the model to make sure everything looks good
Now the only thing left to do is optimize the model. Right now the model is around 4000 triangles and we need to get it down to 1200-1400, depending on the character. Some of our squads -the Berserker for example- are only composed of one unit, so we can keep more details. Others, like the shield guards, have three members, so we need to be uber-careful not to have too many polygons in a squad. While an iPad Air could run a game with a lot of polygons, slower devices like the iPad Mini would struggle a lot here.
In this particular example, Dan got it down to 1300. Good job!
In a coming article, our animator Kenny will run us through the steps necessary for rigging and animating this beast, ultimately leading to this amazing death animation!
As a treat, here's the Hi-Def illustration made by Diego, that you will see in your army management screens.
We've got new units being done constantly, you'll see new things coming soon!
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