The character team describes their pipeline: ZBrush high-poly sculpting, retopology, UVs and layered PBR materials. They discuss Eugene Morrow's missing eye blinks, 2D versus 3D concepts, armor material choices, Sand Nomad and Sandworm creation, and shipping quality.
TL;DRRetopologizing means rebuilding a huge high-poly sculpt as a low-poly mesh that can run in game, tracing its shape and silhouette with as few polys as possible while still animating well.
Just building a mesh that can actually go in the game. Because the high polys can be several million, tens of millions of polys, and that can never go in.
So essentially you freeze your mesh. You have your high poly, then you decimate it and then bring it into your retopology tool and then start tracing over it with polys and try to recreate the same exact shape with the least amount of polys as possible, yet enough for animation to still be able to move it around. And like Corey mentions in the video, about having to keep the silhouette and making sure that no matter what angle you look at that thing in a 3D space, it will always create the exact same silhouette. That way the character doesn't get lost in the translation between the high and the low.
I would have assumed you guys would have said the high poly phase because you get to make such detail. It seems like you're attracted to the challenge of going, all right, we got this really pretty thing that looks awesome, a lot of polys, will never work in-game, but now we get to put it in-game.
Yeah, there's two aspects. There's the making it as good as you want it to be, and then there's the ability to get it in the game to mimic how great your original source looked.
TL;DRThe clip's missing blinks came from the actor, who never blinked in the recording; they agree exaggerating facial movement can make characters feel more alive, but give no specific fix.
I love that question. So I took that video, and there's actually a longer version where he goes through these lines that he recorded for us. And I noticed when I took the video that he never blinked at all. And there was very little muscle movement around the eyes in general. I was like, this is weird.
Yeah. And I'm like, this is just strange, he's not blinking. And so I went back and I pulled up all of his videos of the actor himself and actually watched the entire clips of the same exact lines that I had playing on the character, because I'm like, oh, surely animation just didn't add the eye blinks and everything.
He never blinks the entire time. I'm like, this can't be right. Because when they blink, we get that data. And our characters blink, and in the lines that are 100% acted out and set, everything moves accordingly, including the eyelids.
So it was an acting choice, partially, but also it's interesting that, and you see this in other areas within the CG world, by adding imperfections or adding more human elements, you can make it more realistic, right? That's the whole lens grime effect and things like that on the camera.
Well, I think that's a good point, though. We do find that when you exaggerate things, it can bring it to life more, especially on a computer screen. We're putting all these effects over it. There's only so much realism. You're still not 100% there yet. And so you've got to exaggerate things, catch that person's attention. But heads are also hard because they're the things that we always look at. We all know what a head is supposed to look like because we stare at them.
Yeah, if it wasn't in the source material, the capture, that's something that, if it ends up bothering enough people, animators can surely go in and add. Maybe that just adds to the Morrow character. He is just a guy who doesn't blink that often.
Very loud. In fact, Josh Herman, our art director, is right next door with Steve Bender. And when Sean's in a meeting, I see them politely walk over to the glass and shut the door. I put my headphones on.
I love doing it. I have different playlists on my Spotify. If I'm working on VFX, I listen to one playlist that I have. I have another one. I have my non-word playlist versus my word playlist.
Both are great. With Jeremiah, when he does a 3D concept, it's great because it's usually something you can start from. So it kind of jump-starts the process of making it. But 2D is great too, because you get to interpret things. So just slightly different things you get to do with both. They're both good.
And they kind of offer you two different things, I assume, right? You get more creative license when it's a 2D concept, because even if you do orthos, you still may not know exactly what the back or the sides look like until you put it there.
TL;DRForrest makes art in his spare time, often small pieces to test new software versions, since as CG supervisor he must stay current on tools and enjoys building pipelines.
I create all kinds of art in my spare time. All the time. I keep doing things all the time. One thing that I do in my free time, because with the CG supervisor role you're just kind of jumping around the different pipelines, it's really important that I always keep very up to date on the latest software, and also understand what other software applications are doing, to try to make sure that we're staying on par with everybody else, if not ahead. So I really understand other game engines. I understand lots of different software packages. When a new type of application comes out, whether it's a new version of Substance Designer or a new version of Marvelous whatever, I'll push myself to make a little piece of art to utilize all the new features of these applications. And I always will finish. Whenever I start an art thing, I don't just start working on a piece of art and then kind of go through the process, because I really enjoy building out the pipelines. I want to know how to go from this program to this program to this program and make it as good as possible. And also, I don't build characters for eight years of my career. So when I jump to these different disciplines, I really try to utilize my inexperience, not having eight years of doing something solid but maybe only two or three years, and to really utilize what the software has to offer to get me really far, as far as how far I could push things. And so I really enjoy utilizing software, and then that generates some cool art.
It's a pretty interesting workflow. The way we do it, we have sub-materials and each sub-material can have four layers. The fourth layer is the base layer and then we build up variation on top of that. But it's pretty much just like a layer stack in Photoshop. So we have been working on making new materials, and then you just layer those up to get a cool effect.
TL;DRPlayers will probably choose among predefined surface types and colors for armor pieces, which indirectly changes PBR settings, but not freely adjust values like specular.
There's a yes and a no to that question. In theory, I'd be willing to bet you will more than likely be able to select different surface types for the different pieces of armor and stuff like that. Maybe this specific item supports three different types of materials, and that could be a plastic compared to a metal compared to a carbon fiber, and you would be choosing which one you would want. So in theory you would be changing your PBR settings, because you would be choosing these predefined things. But you wouldn't have the option to drag the specular around on it, because we wouldn't want to expect you to know that 152, 153, 151 is a specific surface type, because everything is kind of hard-coded in there as far as what the recommended settings are to get the optimal visuals with your lighting conditions. So that can be a little tricky. But being able to select through different surface types, and then within that surface type select the different supported fabrics or textiles that would make up the patterns, maybe as a secondary option, would be about as far as I would imagine we would take it.
When I'm at work, it's not a ton, because I feel like when I'm at work, I'm a production artist, and I'm producing a specific piece of art that needs to fit within certain requirements. Personal work, it's a lot more, because that's passion that you're putting in there. And of course you do the same with work, but again, it's: I need to get to this result, and whatever it takes to get there.
TL;DRUnder the old approach a new character could take about five months with repeated revisions, while the Sand Nomad, including new material research, took three artists about three weeks at most.
I think we can both speak for that one. In fact, I'd like to extend that question, because this has changed. I can tell you how long it used to take, and then you tell me how long it takes now. Originally the character would go through a great deal of revisions in the past, because it was very difficult getting to the quality bar that we needed with the approach that was being taken in regards to the requirements needed. I think the old approach works great for certain situations, but some of the limitations that the MMO portion puts on that and stresses on that really didn't let the characters get to their full potential. So you would have a character artist or a group of them working on an asset for a couple months and then it wouldn't pass a final approval process because it just wasn't quite right. And as we saw in the before and after in yesterday's video, it was very clear that what we see now, what you see in the after, is how we envisioned it to look. And before, we would see it and we'd be like, this is just not there yet. We know that potential is not tapped yet. And Chris is very persistent in making sure we've tapped the potential of what we're capable of doing. And so you would move on to an additional month, now you're at four months, and then you would go through one more revision, and now you're at five months, and the character's still not final. But now, how long are we?
I think three artists touched it, worked on it at different points. And from the time they got the go-ahead, it was probably three weeks at most, I think, for the entire run-through.
I can make pretty things all I want, but there's a foundation in place. The tech still isn't perfect yet, but now we have a foundation. We're creating things. We're getting things approved and out the door, which is the most important thing now. And now we can only improve the process.
The Sandworm, that was mostly Josh taking feedback and then just coming up with something. With the creatures, I feel like there's going to be a lot of freedom. But with something like the marine armor that Omar was working on, there's a design brief, there's very specific things it needs to hit. Different assets allow different amounts of freedom. All of us walk by Jeremiah and we make comments on the art he's doing. That stuff makes its way in. As many eyes as possible on something, it's going to be better.
In terms of the design brief, that kind of runs through materials and stuff like that, and that helps guide us towards that stuff for texturing. And the rest is just the concept, because Chris gets his eyes on that, it gets approved, and then, all right, make this. And go.
TL;DRForrest says the biggest challenge is hitting performance specs while keeping artists' quality intact in game; Corey adds each character has a troublesome pipeline step, and rigid metal armor must still deform for rigging.
I think for me, definitely, because I'm coming from making sure we can ship the product with these characters. That's my primary objective. Hit the visual quality bar, be shippable. Those are the two challenges. So for me, the biggest challenge is creating a character that's up to the standards of how good Corey, Omar, Josh, our incredibly talented character team, can make a character. I want to be able to make sure that that is getting into the game and we're not downsizing, cutting corners to make it work. We've all played games where we've seen assets in the game and you're like, I bet you that's not what it looked like when the artist was done with it. And so the one thing that I really wanted to make sure of is that when the artist was done with it, that's what it looks like in the game. And so that to me is a challenging thing: hitting all your performance specs, but keeping that quality up.
I don't know if there's any one specific thing, but usually with every character there's one aspect of the pipeline where it's like, on this one the game mesh is being really annoying, because you worked on it for a while, and you need to go back, fix stuff, update the UVs, and move back on to the texturing. It really depends on the asset, because sometimes it just runs smooth, and other times there's one part where it's just like, I can't get this approved.
And there's a lot of challenges too. The character artists have to do things that in the past have generally been accepted as okay, like hard surfaces, anything that's metal. The character artists have to build topology that now supports a hard object on top of an object that's rigid. Previously, in games like The Witcher, they move their arm up and down, the metal bends and everything.
Yeah, there was plenty of that. I was working on a character and I had a metal chest plate and it's like, well, how's your arm going to go forward? So you start to nudge things in and things get ironed out, but it's frustrating. It's like, why didn't I think of that? I was doing this because it looks pretty.
And then our rigger tries to put hockey gear on us and he's like, could you do that in this? And then I'm like, no, and he goes, and you can't do it in the game.
But at the same time, I've known a lot of people that are quite successful art-wise with the mentality that a good design will sell itself visually. So if you make it work and you make it work real, theoretically that will translate pretty well on the screen, especially if you have some art direction on top of a good design.