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art-of-swords: Rapier | 19th century | European | Source
Petit Jour - Simon Cadilhac, Matthieu Daures, Louis Holmes, Jade Khoo, Léa Rey-Mauzaize
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Feel like getting creative and making your own Coat of Arms? Here’s a beginners guide of understanding them to help you create your own.
-Crafts4Geeks
Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
some of our early work on Zora’s hair! That painting at the top is still one of my faves that I’ve done/
Ojisama to Neko: “I’m right here.” [Original comic can be found on Twitter HERE]
I went ahead and put the translation on the original comic, just because it’s good practice for me as I work on my own comics and art. It forces me to study how professional artists do their lettering and how they structure their text to fit with the action. I feel like I’m learning something, at least. Someday I aspire to pack as much cuteness into a page as Sakurai-sensei does. PLEASE SUPPORT THE ORIGINAL ARTIST ON TWITTER AND PIXIV.
Portrait of A Dame in Shining Armor.
I started this drawing back in 2016. This is a portrait of my Tiefling Fighter who is simply known as “A Dame in Shining Armor..” When i think of her, my mind always went back to this one sketch. I’ve done many many drawings of her, but never finished them as I was never happy about her face... This is the only drawing I’ve done where I’ve feel like I’ve captured how I actual see her. I was going for a ‘sad, beaten, but loyal dog’ look.
Decided to quickly finish it and slap on some simple color. I’m sad I didn’t have time to color her hair. u_u (...Also I thought she was too yellow overall, but then I turned my flux off and her colors are perfect. XD)
I got back into WoW and I’m having a ton of fun in the new Legion expansion.
Here’s a pic of my Blood Elf Warlock and her 2 new best friends - Thal’Kiel (the skull) and Lyndras!! Lydras is so nice and he teaches me how to sew.
Back on #Zootopia, before an animator would roll on to the show animating shots, they’d start by working on crowd cycles for background characters. These crowd cycles would then be used by the crowds department to help populate the the world of Zootopia and make it feel alive. This bear “standing around” animation was the one that I liked animating the most. It was a fun challenge to mix human and bear characteristics into the same performance. #disney #disneyanimation #disneyanimators #cg #animation #behindthescenes
The ultimate prize!
the threats of a team healer
@shinyellen
Damn right.
Donkeys with Flower Crowns
@the-typhonian
@isei-silva
DIY Stop-motion animation I did for fun last week using 2 Modibot figures, green masking tape, and 2 vegetable cutting boards.
(Hi-res version here)
I’ve been wanting to try this for a long time now. Aside from filming toy action figures, this was the first time trying to do actual stop-motion animation. It was super hard animating straight ahead without being able to go back to redo poses, but the challenge very addicting!
Even though the Modibot figure I animated isn’t a pro kinetic stop-motion armature, I was surprised how well the plastic figure could hold a pose.
The stock Modibot was only $10 on Amazon! At that price I definitely recommend it as a super inexpensive way to try out stop-motion. I did however buy some additional 3D printed parts from Shapeways to modify it to have clavicles and an extra spine joint for better posing.
Below is the first test I did earlier last week. I used the masking tape as a sticky surface for the feet to tie-down to, and a green Modibot for the rig arm.
I animated the run next. Here’s the green screen version:
Shot using a 1080p Logitech webcam with TV Paint, and composited in After Effects:
I’ll go into more detail on the figure setup, animation, and compositing process in a future post if anyone is interested. :)
Wayne Unten, ladies and gents. This is so cool!
For what you have taken, you must return.
You shouldn’t have messed with what you couldn’t understand, the soldier warned the wanderer.
Death will follow you everywhere.
A halloween au story I’m working on. Probably gonna be 20 pages or more.
My comicbook Persephone is out in France. It has been a looong road from the starting point to the release date. I have to thank many people without whom none of this would have been possible (could it sounds more cliché ahah) : Tamia Baudouin, Queen of bande-dessinée, David Chauvel, who said ‘amen’ to every weird path I decided to take during the book’s conception, and of course all the friends I met while drawing the book. Life has been so great since I started to sketch Persephone, I’m thinking she was my lucky charm, I’m sad to let her go live her own adventures without my help.
Farewell little girl !
We know that it’s probably magic.
Tiara, 19th Century.
Day 21