Bringing Video Game Characters to Life: From Concept Art to Playable Pilots
-
Hello my dear friends, how many interesting characters do you know from the games? And which of them is the most interesting and memorable? Surely you have something to share, so I will share it. For example, I really like Kratos from the last part of God of War. Because his visual style and image reflects not only militancy, but also shows his development from the point of view of lived experience.
In our game, we try to convey the character and attitude of each pilot. First of all, this is displayed in his visual style - the pretty girl Fay, the purposeful test pilot Helen. All this is necessary so that you can play the character who is closer to you personally.
However, how does character creation start? What do developers face, and why is it a laborious process? Let's figure it out.
The birth of a character begins with an idea, and a conceptual target. Initially, the future pilot exists only on “paper” in the design document. After that, it's given the concept to artists who must turn words into reality, but so far only in 2D format. At this stage, the appearance, clothing, and small details are being worked out.
All this is needed so that by looking at it you can understand. “Yes, this dude is tough, he must have seen a lot of battles” such thoughts can be influenced by a hard look, hairstyle, preferred type of clothing, and much more. Although in our game, the pilots look like k-pop stars x) but is that bad?)After a long work on thinking over the concept art, 3D artists join the work. The task of which is to embody everything in volume. First, based on a beautiful and detailed concept, he created a high-poly model with the correct proportions. Then comes the process of creating a low-poly model. But why is it so?
Everything is quite simple, these clever actions are needed in order to first, when modeling a high-poly object, let's say, “Bake” it into a normal map, which will then be applied to a low-poly 3D model. In general, The concept of a high-poly model and a low-poly model is very relative, it all depends on the size of the model, the game in which it is used and many more parameters, but we digress, let's continue, what do we have next step?
On the created low-poly model, a normal map baked from the high-poly model is applied. This process makes it possible to show the character in detail, while not wasting a lot of resources on your computer. After all, the more polygons are displayed on your monitor, the more resources and time are required for rendering. In other words, if your frame contains a huge number of pilots from other players, with high-poly models, then your FPS will tend to zero. And we do not want to allow this, because it is extremely important for us that the game starts with you stably and smoothly.
Therefore, the developers go to tricks and make the future pilot look not only beautiful and attractive to you. But it also didn’t require a high-performance computer. Ultimately, the finished character model is endowed with a skeleton for further animation of his movements, which is usually done by other specialists.
In general, the creation of a game character, be it a pilot or anything else, is a long and laborious process that is carefully controlled at each of its stages. And we are glad to show you our works. Concluding this post, I want to ask you, if these are interesting? Would you like to know more about how games are made? I am waiting for you in the comments to discuss the characters you like the most. Until next time!