Hellpoint: How to make a video game character

Welcome back to "How it's made? Video Game edition" ;)

Previously;
- How hitboxes work; http://imgur.com/a/fGIAG
- How a frame is rendered; http://imgur.com/gallery/714ao

Someone asked how video game characters are made. It's a long and complex process where a single character can take months to make with many different specialists. So I'll try to make it as simple as possible.

On a side note, we started sending a demo to some people, and our Greenlight and Kickstarter have been announced to be on April 6. If you look Hellpoint on Youtube, you may find people trying it out. :)

Software: Photoshop and many others

We start by deciding what our character should look like. It can involve dozen of drawing and concept. The software used is really dependent of the artist. Each artist has their own way of doing things. Some mix 2D with 3D, some prefer to just draw. Some even start from paper sketches before scanning them and painting them on computer.

In some case, we may need dozen of drawing to figure out every aspect and angles of a character. Even more if its wearing equipment.

Software: Z-Brush

Once we like the concept, we made a high-resolution sculpture in Z-Brush. It's very high resolution, made of voxel - million of dot in space, a cloud that form a shape. The file for this specific character is a bit over 500 Mb on disk.

We want that kind of detail because it allows us to get imperfections, which would be impossible otherwise. It's like sculpting clay; you always have tiny imperfection which makes it unique.

Software: Z-Brush

Once the shape is good, a first "coat" of color is applied. In Z-Brush, this is called "polypaint". It's a basic color coat to figure out what goes where. We don't spend too much time on that because more details will be added later.

Software: Z-Brush (or other)

We make here a low resolution geometry, made from points and triangles. This character, being a huge boss, is made of 24,000 triangles. Our main character is about 9,000 triangles and most enemies are about 6,000. We have to take into account that they can also equip equipment, which means more triangles.

Even if the mesh display some shape that are not triangles, it's only to help edit it. In the end, it's always triangles. ;)

Software: 3DS Max or Maya

We take the low resolution mesh and unwrap it on a 2D plane. This allows us to assign an image to position on the mesh. This is how a mesh is colored in a video game; the video card draw the texture on the geometry.

If a spatial position is describe as X, Y and Z, the unwrap is U and V. For purpose of 3D Texture, the W is reserved. R, G, B, A (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha) are also used to assign color on the mesh, if needed. So each point in space of a mesh is at least 10 numbers; R, G, B, A, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

Software: Z-Brush or Substance Painter

We then take the high-resolution and the low-resolution mesh and make the software create a texture that shows all the difference between them. It's called a normal map, and it stores information about how the high resolution mesh is shaped.

In the game, this information is used to decide how the lights and reflection are applied to the rendering. The normal map is local information of surface, where the Red color is horizontal and the Green is vertical. The blue color is usually not used, but sometime can store the depth.

Software: Substance Painter

We add a lot more detail by painting directly on the mesh in a software called Substance Painter. This allows us to paint not only color, but physical property on the mesh. Is it made of metal? Plastic? Is it rough? Smooth? Is it emitting light? We can even add detail to the normal map.

This allows us to export 4 different texture for the character; the diffuse (color), the normal, the metal/smoothness, and the emission in format handled by the video game engine.

Software: 3DS Max or Maya

To make a character move, we need to "rig" it. We create a skeleton, in a way fairly similar to how living organism move in real life. Each bones can move around.

For movies, "muscles" are also added to make the mesh bulge out when flexing. In video game, this kind of technique is usually too expensive to use or is reserved to specific scene where that kind of deformation is quite noticeable, like facial closeup.

Software: 3DS Max or Maya

Each vertices are assigned "weight" to one or many bones of the skeleton. Usually a game for mobile will be limited to 2 bones per vertex. In modern PC games, we can go up to 4. However, there's a performance cost with having so many bones influencing a single vertex.

The animation here shows the weight distribution for each bones, one at a time.

Software: 3DS Max or Maya

An animator add keyframe for each position the character takes. Chaining them gives you an animation. The character is moving, and its skin is deforming to follow the bones.

Software: Video Game Editor

We then bring all that data (mesh, texture, animation) to the video game editor. Usually, a video game engine also have an editor to build the game.

We create materials that targets all our texture and a shader. A shader is a video card program that describe how the mesh should be drawn, how all the texture are used

Software: Video Game Editor

You can see the low poly geometry here. Even if the number of triangles is low, the normal, metal and smooth maps help a ton to give more detail to the character.

Software : Video Game Editor

We then add all the needed stuff to make it come to life; collider, hitboxes, AI, animation component, etc. The code may override some animation, for example when a feet hit the ground.

Sound, particles, or any kind of special effect may be added on the animation or the mesh itself.

Software: In Game

This is the final result of an animated character in our game. All the effects have been added to make it draw the same was as in-game.

And now he is ready to crush you in a world of hurt. :)

Let me know if you would like to learn more about how video games are made. Do you have anything specific you would like to know?