| |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
We talk with Civilization Revolution's art lead, Brian Busatti, about how leaders evolve from basic drawings to dynamic digital animations
Everything you see in a video game begins life as an idea in someone’s head. The process that happens between the formulation of those ideas and the building of the final assets is a long and interesting one, especially for complex items like the leaderheads in a Civ game. I'd like to walk you through how we took Civilization Revolution leader characters Isabella and Bismarck from concept sketches to centerpiece game assets.
For both leaders, we began with a concept painting created by one of our artists that captures the essential feel of the character. We had a list of traits that we wanted these characters to impart to the player. For example, both characters are pretty formal – Bismarck is very upright and has his shoulders thrown back, and Isabella's chin is raised and she's holding her scepter. Once the painting was complete, it was handed off to a modeler, who blocked out a basic version of the model using our modeling software. Once we had that, an animator looked at the model to check for potential problems with that character's animation. The original concept artist worked closely with the modeler and animator to provide feedback about the design throughout this process, so he could help if the modeler had a question about clothing or the animator had a question about the poses the character will take, for instance.
Once we established basic models for Bismarck and Isabella that matched the feel of the concept art, we detailed them up. Hard, shiny surfaces like Bismarck's helmet and Isabella's scepter had to be rendered differently than their clothes, since in the real world there’s a big difference between the way cloth and copper look to us. We made models with higher polygon counts and mapped them to our original models, and used these new high-poly models to set up the lighting effects on the characters. We created the texture maps so that they didn’t look like plastic dolls. And while all of this was going on, we'd keep checking to make sure we were staying true to the essential character we'd created in our concept art, and that the character kept in style with the rest of the game.
With Civilization Revolution, we were going for a more stylized and informal look overall and we had a lot of fun creating the leaders. Sid really wanted to push the "weatherman effect" of having the leaders pop up in front of the game, so by keeping consistent lighting for all of them, we could include the fun interactions like having them shove the advisors and other leaders out of the way when they came on screen. We built many of our own tools and learned lots of lessons about getting particular effects out of our lighting, shading, and rendering systems.
Creating a character for a game requires spending a great deal of time on details like normal maps and ambient occlusion, but it is equally as important to make sure that what you're creating is consistent in look and feel with the rest of the game and that it delivers the realism and emotion you want players to experience each time they interact with the character.
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
