Wow you guys just raised the bar for characters. Really inspiring!
Incredible attention to detail.
How much of the clothing was done in Marvelous Designer, and how much by hand?
Absolutely amazing!!
Thank you guys so much for sharing these screenshots and answering questions. It provides great insight to the industry and inspiration to us all.
By any chance will you be at the ZBrush Summit?
Thanks again guys!
snowzbc - we didnt adopt marvelous designer until late in production so most of what you see is done by hand, with the exception being Lakshmi’s scarf. Some things were blocked out in marvelous to get a quick base as well.
mind blowing work guys! this game is an visual masterpiece. inspiring in every single detail :D
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My god, talk about iron patience! I love the differing levels of Lycan forms and how you made these creatures actually look as though the curse of lycranthropy truly is a form of disease, and how it seems that it’s bursting and excreted out of the human form so well, that it almost looks painful!
Beautiful work and so much to learn and inspire from here.
I have few questions and I hope you don’t mind me asking:
From the first image ‘Galahad high poly renegade’.
- How you managed to do the torn effect of the bottom of his shirt.
- Are those small stitches over the drape covering his shoulder, separate mesh or alpha?
- You have given separate mesh border for the edges of the cloth, what you prefer to use zbrush or maya/max and would appreciate to hear the process if you have any fast and smart way to achieve the result.
From the image ‘Lakshmi high poly’
- The design on the borders, are those used inside zbrush using curve features?
- The pattern (like flowers) over her upper body (chest). How you have managed to make those design sit so well on the surface.
I hope the above questions will help lot of people like me.
Looking forward to hear and I expect to see many more amazing creation from the team.
Best Regards,
Kaushik Saha
outstanding work, the eye for detail is astonishing… you guys are rockstars 
Question: in post #5 the character sculpts have fuzz on their jackets and scraves. Was this actually used in the bake? or was it more of a we can do this in sculpt because it looks bad ass but it really serves no real purpose?
I’m wondering about the baking process too! In the “old days” there wouldn’t be much point in sculpting the micro detail into the model, as it would just muddy up the normal map, and be better off added in the texturing process. Do you bake all that fuzziness and fine detail from the sculpt? If so, what size normal map do you use? Is HD sculpting involved? Do you bake them to separate UV’s first and then comp it together afterwards?
Also you speak of wrinkle maps. Is this something you add on top of the model in engine as it deforms?
Oh, in case it wasn’t obvious: I’m blown away. I shall now spend the weekend trying to put myself together again. Perhaps sculpt a small stone.
I thought I had ordered your book but I’ve just been informed by Amazon that your Art book is out of stock, damn, any idea when it will be available again?
Simply overwhelming art direction and teamwork!
I guess as the hardware advances, the artist can reveal more and more detail!
Thank you very much for sharing the wonderful images of the characters and assets.
Professional grade teamwork displayed for the world to see!
Thanks again guys!
The fuzziness and cloth details was something some of us added for presentation purposes. In game all of that was handled through materials.
The exception to that was the fine detailing on the armor. We displaced that in Zbrush as it gave us a better idea of whether or not the armor design would work with the rest of the costume before we progressed to the texturing phase. Because the detail was created by masks we could add vertex color and then bake it down to use as an ID map for the texturing process.
Hope that answers your question!
Thanks for answering re.: the cloth fuzz. Stuff looks freaking amazing. Out of curiosity would it be possible to see one of the bake high poly’s vs the presentation HP. it’d be super educational and just like wicked cool. I keep looking at these and just like da fuq these are amazing
I just wanted to answer a question posed earlier about the hair creation.
The hair process was definitely an involved path to completion. The base hair textures were created in Maya using Shave and a Haircut. Each ‘patch’ of hair was grown from a thin plane and groomed using the Shave tools. Once the silhouette and layering looked good, Mental Ray was used to render multiple passes (color, depth, occlusion, etc.). These passes were then composited in Photoshop. Additional precise hair strands were painted in Photoshop as well. It usually look around five unique patches to define the overall hair shape. When completed, they were all atlased in one UV sheet. The main reason we used Shave was because of the high fidelity alpha it could output, as well as the natural look of hair layering. In our engine, the hair was rendered as an alpha material, so we could retain all of the soft detail and avoid the crunchy artifacts of alpha test hair.
The hair cards were all placed on the head model by hand. In many cases we could share some prior work between characters. We used Mari to texture an under-paint layer of hair on the head models, mainly to aid in transition areas around the forehead. Mari was also used for flow maps for the hair to direct the anisotropic spec.
The hair material utilized a shift map to breakup the hair’s specular response. This helped to separate the hair ‘strands’ as the highlight was shifted based on the direction of the flow map, by an intensity defined using the grayscale values of the shift map. The material also had a secondary specular parameters to give the appearance of backscattering.
Interesting to see this mentioned…I often do my hair cards using Fibermesh in zbrush to get rather realistic results. It is good to see that the hair came out in such a beautiful way.
…my jaw just dropped and smashed into gazillion pieces… AMAZING work guys, congrats!
Thank you for the insights on the hair and cloth fuzz.
Amazing work!!
This game was the one that I most anticipated when I first got my PS4 and I enjoyed every last second of it when I bought it. It’s a pleasure of mine to say thank you for all your hard work in creating this “gaming marvel of mankind” and you are all who I look up to when creating art of my own. Game Informer showcased some of the methods used to make the art in this game, but this thread is much more personal and in-depth. Once again, thank you for contributing your art to such a fantastic game and allowing me to learn from you guys by posting your art in this thread:-)
For an aspiring character artist this is stunning and inspiring at the same time.
Thanks for the insight and sharing of techniques!
exciting work
Superb work guys!