excellent work
Hey Adam, another very inspired fan here. I loved the clothes you made for the characters, could briefly you talk a little about the process that you go through creating clothes? From base mesh to high poly?
I love the game as much as I love the art. It is my aspiration to create to that level of mastery. Thanks
~Jose
Well done! outstanding art!
Champion! Excellent work Mike. 
Looking forward to playing this too.
don´t know if anybody posted this video, which gives some rigging insight
the models are perfect, thanks for sharing!
I can´t believe what you achieved with the alpha planes for the hair - can you share some tips?
Hey Dryn. awesome work and really nice details on the clothes.
I have a question: How long did NaughtyDog gave you to make a character ? With such an attention to detail, im curious ?!
And one more. Is it really necessary that detail, since in a LP and a 2k texture, and gameplay, you barely see that detail in the Normal map ?
Great work - looking forward to playing the game.
incredible~~~~~~!!
incredible work, I love these characters. the attention to the details is amazing. Thanks for sharing! I finally got the game, can’t wait to play it tonight 
Ultra Realistic Sculpts Mike! Very Very detailed Character Sculpt on Main Character to villains to monsters. Awesome!
Sketchbook - http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?173520-Kenji-s-CG-Texturing-Work/page2
Blog - http://amazingbeggars.wordpress.com/
Reel - https://vimeo.com/66303342
@Myselfsama thanks Jose… my general clothing process is to gather photo ref, create simple base mesh in Maya, sculpt in ZBrush (very broad forms first, dividing only when necessary), retop and create low mesh in Topogun from highres, fine-tune geo in Maya, reproject highres ZBrush sculpt to new lowpoly mesh, unwrap Zbrush’s first division in Maya/Headus Uvlayout, then add finer details to highres sculpt in ZBrush by sculpting and using masks created in Photoshop. Xnormal is used to bake out normal maps. Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions
What are some of your workflows for creating these characters? Do you start off by blocking in a mesh or do you use z spheres or some other method? Any information you could give would be very appreciated, thanks.
I forgot to ask this in the previous post but what did you guys use for texturing? Are they all hand painted or sourced and with what program did you use?
So many questions… !
For hair it usually starts out as just a paintover on the bald head in-game (might dig up some examples for that) - and then we’ll usually draw out UV/geo plans on top of this to figure out what the main cards will be. Typically just for about 1/3rd of the hair, as it will all get mirrord around to the other sides. So within that 1/3rd chunk I’ll try to think about the different alpha cards I’ll need to build the whole head of hair (there’s only so much texture space you can use, and the fewer cards, the more time you have to paint out the texture and improve it’s quality).
From there you construct and paint out a first pass, start mirroring all over the head, and slowly refine the textures and geo together based what you see in-game. There’s no easy or set way to do anything though, you just have to have a rough idea then adapt and keep referring back to your reference along the way… then eventually you have to sign it off and move along.
Henry’s hair started out as a 100 tri black sphere or something like that, he looked awesome with it in-game… Then once that silhouette felt good, took it into Zbrush and used the noise modifier to get the final thing. Took barely any time at all but worked out good enough… At that point it was like screw it, we just got to ship this thing. I would have liked to have tried an alpha affro instead, similar to how Soa Lee (a very talented character artist here) made Marlene’s hair. I’m sure she will stop by to show her work too.
Blocking out the hair with some simple geo or rough sculpt before jumping into cards can be a nice way to get a feel for the character whilst working on him too.
Typical FMA characters use a mix of 2048s and 1024s (split at hair/head/jacket/arms/legs/boots). Ingame is a mix of 512s and 1024s. Wherever convenient we’d share certain textures between characters.
Length of time varied massively… getting Joel and Ellie up to their initial quality took many months, and then still had adjustments gone on throughout the whole project. Ellie’s head and hair were redone post Ellen page incident… I’d say that alone took a good 4 weeks. Once things were rolling though characters got a lot quicker to make, which was great because production sucks ! Character heads like James, Robert and Henry were just modified versions of Tommy. Likewise a lot of our other enemies stemmed from Joel. If we were really tight on pressure we could make a new head very quickly just changing facial shapes and textures directly in Maya. We only had 5 character artists in-house (Soa Lee, Jaehoon Kim, Adam Scott, Mike Syvmbersky) and then a lot of outsource at our disposal. Joel’s beard alone took a good 2.5 weeks, but then after that we were making similar beards in under half the time.
Clickers took longer, but we’d reshape the in-game textured fungus into different silhouettes that all shared the same textures. Couldn’t tell you what are draw calls were, but we cut our characters down multiple times through the project, and adding the dismemberment system made things even more.
We didn’t use any scan data, just all hand made stuff with a few photo sourced alphas. We tried scanning Joel’s Daughter sarah, but it didn’t fit in with the other characters and give us the look we wanted, so we went with the hand made one.
The male body rig was initially established by Judd Simantov working with Rich Diamant and Care Michaud from sony san diego on a prototype Joel. Ellie had her own unique rig by Judd, and the adult females were defined from Tess (also rigged by Judd).
Our typical process is just to get the high poly made as soon as possible, get base textures down, and results in-game ASAP to start moving forward and iterating. And then at the very end just finalizing it all for game. Working with our creative director Neil druckmann and game director Bruce straley to get the right looks of characters was very important, and we’d constantly be going back and forth at the start, which is why we tried to keep things very open and sketchy - that’s really when you are able to push and learn the most too. The minority of the time was actually spent sculpting… A huge deal was working everything together (paintovers, pushing polys, texturing and sculpt/geo modifications). Things like pockets and seams on clothes usually just started out as very loose sketches on block meshes before getting final polish and split off into seperate subtools - but each artist had their own methods on this too. The bloater started off as a nude male getting pushed around with dynamesh, and then eventually broken apart into all his different pieces.
The black and white portraits were screenshots directly from the PS3 (saved off at high res with cutscene lights) - and then brought into photoshop for depth of field and tiny touch ups.
Textures were hand painted using Mudbox (thanks to Hanno Hagedorn for showing me some of his awesome techniques on skin for this!) and Photoshop (hair being entirely painted here).
Hope that answers most of the questions!
If anyone is interested in more info on the rigs, fire away and I’ll do my best to answer. I know this is not a rig forum, but seeings though its come up, I figured I’d throw that out there
The real reason I’m posting here, is I just wanna say that what was so amazing about working on the characters on this project for me was not only how talented and skilled Michael is, but how f@!#ng awesome he is to work with. Its very rare that you find someone who is humble, passionate and incredibly talented. This is the kind of thing that obviously cant come through by looking at someone’s work, so I thought I’d make a point of mentioning it.
-Judd
Thanks for giving that breakdown! It was really informative and eye opening. You guys make some seriously beautiful art.
Still have so much to learn but seeing works like this makes me excited to keep Zbrushin. Thanks for sharing and for the insight!
Although it’s been said already, I have to give you my thanks too.
The info you shared is amazing, and in my opinion your work shows that scanning a real person is certainly not the best option to bring emotion to the character.
Can’t have enough of these workflow breakdowns, so if you 're feeling like it, please continue to share.
ps. I can’t believe how good the hair looks… as I was recently trying various methods for hair I have to say, they are the best cg i have seen up to now.
Thanks for answering some of the questions.
Stunning! These works are so good I would have thought they where real human scans. This kind of work set the bar very high for most of us, and shows us what can be achieved with allot of talent and hard work.