amazing work!!
womball: the thickness is given thanks to a normal map . If the character looks so much details,etc thatās because behind those lowpoly version, weāve made a hires version of the model in Zbrush and then transfert all the details, fold and forms onto the In-game version.
Iām aware of the high res to low res transfers in the normal. Have no idea about creating thickness via a normal though, thatās new to me. How would you sculpt the geometry in zbrush to do that? I guess you use xnormal too?
!Great as always - superb detail.
u guys at ubisoft montreal are one of best (if not ādaā) in the industry.
in a way itās a shame that the AC2/B engine canāt show great art style of the game in a proper quality (playing on xbox and u can say that the engine is old and dated) - really hope ur tech team will update the engine for AC3 so you can show your skill even more:)
best of luck.
Really nice work! Congrats for the top row and congrats to the whole team who worked on brotherhood!
Beautiful work and thanks for sharing so us mere mortals can peek behind the scenes.
Simply amazing!!! congratulations on all who worked on Brotherhood
Beautiful work, Nicolas! Especially for such a tight turn-around time. Well done.
thank you for working on this gameā¦your work is fantastic.
I want to play the game!!!..(my ps3 got ylod)
so you already started on the one that is gonna come out in 2011? hope you do a great jobā¦good luck and i hope to see you in the industry sometime 
awesome characters ā¦ great work
What did you use for the hair.
Im Assassinās Creed biggest fan all characters are amazing
an hairbrushā¦?
a blowdryerā¦?
no, seriously, itās only polygons with alpha and diffuse, nothing fancy hereā¦
Hey Nicholas and Mark!
First of all. Awesome stuff.
I had one question related to baking a lot of your accessories(mainly strap stuff)
Can you explain your workflow for how you approach this? I.e. what tool you use to bake, do you bake a onto a higher res low poly, then go in and delete edges- or plainly bake onto the res thatās going to be used in the engine? I ask this because if you have a high-res strap, the curvature is obviously smoother then the low-res and I generally get weirdness because of this.
Is alpha blending used just for the buckle/ tuck in bits, or the whole strap? Basically a somewhat detailed workflow from start to finish would be just awesome.
Thanks in advance!
whoās mark ? i guess you mean Laurent.
Anyways, we do not bake belt or straps like the rest of the assets. What we do is rendering them in front view with a normal map shader apply to it. And then comped the render in photoshop directly in the texturemap .
cheers
Marc-Antoine!
the normal map is added to the normal of your mesh, so something baked flat (render in front view) will seem to be bending when applied to a bending low poly meshā¦ am I clear with that one?
yeah I meant marc-antoine ;D,
to be honest itās not quite clear to me. I think Iām a bit lost in your terminology. Not sure what you mean by a normal map shader, you mean a shader that supports normal maps?
Then when you say baked flat(render in front view), do you mean you model the high res model out flat, like a strap for a example, baking it onto a flat low poly, then bend it around the character?
Itād be really awesome if you can get me to understand how you guys do it. A good chunk of stuff I do at work involves straps and it makes me mad I canāt figure out a way to bake those suckers without errors from the difference in curavature from the high-res zbrush sculpt. Basically the edges always end up uneven, and sway off to one side or the other(we use similar final resolution you guys do)
cheers
you dont need to bake anything, just model the hires strap out flat and apply a normal map texture shader ( you can download the shader there http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/normaltexmap ) . Once itās render just copy paste the render into your texture map file in photoshop where your UVS for the strap is located .
once the normatexmap is installed, to create the material you have to put that normaltexmap into the diffuse slot with a 100% self-illumination.
ah ok I understand now:) I think I mainly get the problems because I bake out with the belt around the char, having it flat will definitely make straight lines