Originally Posted by
krisguy This is such a simple question, but what is the workflow for creating these characters? I love seeing them, but I don't get how much work it takes.
Chris Alderson, Art Director: It might be a simple question, but it’s a great one! A lot of planning and teamwork go into creating a great character. First off, we ask ourself this question, “why am I making this character and what is its purpose.” With Quill, before she was a mouse we knew we needed a character that the player can interact with in VR within a reachable space. We had already decided that we wanted you, the player to be true to scale, so it was either action figures or small animals. We landed on rodents and small creatures because it allows us to build a connection to these characters and the world around them. VR is a new and special medium. Like never before, you can have a connection and build a relationship with these characters that are standing right there in front of you. Connection is the word we keep coming back to and drove Quill’s look and feel. Now to the drawing board. First off is the concept phase. Keeping in mind scale and having an emotional connection, we went through a few iterations. Just because we said we wanted our character to be relatable, doesn’t mean it will be without your care and consideration. I start off with a sketch that gives off the feel of what I am going for. And in no way does it need to be perfect from the start. Quill went through a few iterations as you can see below.
Next, I take the model to a simple “block model” stage (A block model is where you create a mesh for every bone in your character that you simply parent or connect each model to each bone. This is a quick and easy way to get the proportions you like by testing out a few poses.) Richard Lico, our Lead Animator and I have worked together for 13 years across 3 different studios, so we have built a great workflow and report. Once he takes a look, Richard might either move the mesh and skeleton himself or gives me detailed notes on things we can fix. Afterwards, we take the model to “grey model” stage where it’s much of the same process, except now the mesh is intact, and we have done a skin weighting pass where the mesh is bound smoothly to the skeleton. Now I pass it back over to Richard and he does another look over of the mesh. He might even do a quick animation test to make sure the character is performing dynamically. Here we can truly evaluate if the character is reaching our goals.
Is Quill meeting her potential? Here we made another pass on the concept. And this is around the time when everyone in the studio was feeling the direction she was headed in.
I personally like to keep characters in the grey model stage for as long as possible, so that we can truly evaluate them within the game with real animations and performing real actions. Once you sculpt the final hi polygon model (via sculpting programs such as ZBrush), bake your maps (copy the detail lighting from your hi poly model onto a lower poly in-game model to create a normal map, specular/roughness or “shininess” map, etc.) and create your final textures, it can be much more difficult to make changes. When that’s all done, then Voila! You have a new character! Hope that helps give a little insight into what goes into creating these characters!
Chris Alderson, Art Director: It might be a simple question, but it’s a great one! A lot of planning and teamwork go into creating a great character. First off, we ask ourself this question, “why am I making this character and what is its purpose.” With Quill, before she was a mouse we knew we needed a character that the player can interact with in VR within a reachable space. We had already decided that we wanted you, the player to be true to scale, so it was either action figures or small animals. We landed on rodents and small creatures because it allows us to build a connection to these characters and the world around them. VR is a new and special medium. Like never before, you can have a connection and build a relationship with these characters that are standing right there in front of you. Connection is the word we keep coming back to and drove Quill’s look and feel. Now to the drawing board. First off is the concept phase. Keeping in mind scale and having an emotional connection, we went through a few iterations. Just because we said we wanted our character to be relatable, doesn’t mean it will be without your care and consideration. I start off with a sketch that gives off the feel of what I am going for. And in no way does it need to be perfect from the start. Quill went through a few iterations as you can see below.
