What is the process for taking a character from concept all the way to in-game?
TL;DRCharacters go from a prioritised shot list through concept discussions with design and animation, sketches and callout sheets, then sculpting, retopology, material passes and optimisation with engineers so many characters can run on screen.
I think Jeremiah could probably handle the first part of that question.
Well, normally we would have the writers... We have a shot list, we call it a shot list, so we have a list of characters that are in the entire game, or outfits. And then we have the producers and the leads kind of figure out which one's the higher priority, so we get a priority list, and so we just pretty much go down the list. And what we'll do is the concept guys will talk with the animation team and the design team and also the art director and the lead, and we'll discuss kind of what the visual look and also the function of the character would be. So we'll talk about, will the players have access to them, or is it an NPC character, or is there a restriction on visibility or movements, all that type of stuff. And then once we lock down on a direction, someone like myself would come do a bunch of sketches, take them to final and then get approvals. And then normally I'll do a callout sheet for a character artist like Omar. Oh, this is the gloves, the front, side, and back. And this is what the helmet looks like from the side.
Well, then once he gives me a drawing, I will sculpt it on our characters, and depending on: is this going to be PU, does the player have access to it, what kind of rig is it on, is it custom, each one of those has its own set of issues and problems to solve. And then we sculpt the character, get the sculpt approved, it matches the concept as much as we can. And then once the high-poly sculpt is approved, we retopo it and we do a lot of stuff to optimize it for the game. And then we find out what kind of metals, what kind of materials, we do a material pass, we talk to the engineers: how can we make sure that this character is running as smooth as possible? So that, hopefully, if all our characters are optimized to the best of our ability, we can have more and more people on screen, so we can have a better MMO experience. And that is usually when it's completed.