In our last update our character artist Benny spoke about the creative development process of the Trüberbrook characters. After one of the characters is finished on paper, the drawings go to the technical team led by Technical Artist Hans Böhme.
How did you proceed after you received a character drawing?
After receiving Bennys character designs, we try to recognize and understand the the most striking features of the designs and then translate the 2d shapes to 3d ones as close as possible to the original drawings. We do this by sculpting a very detailed version of the 3d model which later gets simplified for the game. We then transfer the details of the high density mesh to the simplified 3d model by baking so called normal maps. Normal maps are textures that "fake" detail on more simple surfaces and makes them look almost as good as the original model but at the same time saving huge amounts of rendering time for the computer.
Next we texture the models, which means we are giving them colours and surface informations such as "How shiny is the surface of a model?" or "Is this surface made of metal or another substance?". We also rig the characters, which means we give them basic skeletons that define which area of a model deforms if a certain part of the skeleton moves. Lastly we animate the characters using those skeletons, which in my opinion is one of the most fun and fascinating parts, because here the characters start to come alive and look like living things. After importing all those different parts – the models, the textures and the animations – into our engine, we finally have a game-ready 3D-character to use in the game.
And what are difficulties or problems that can appear?
Sometimes things that work in a 2d drawing do not necessarily work as good on a 3d representation of that character. For example the proportions of certain body parts look really cool from a specific angle in the drawings but look kind of weird if you can examine the characters from many different angles in the 3d software. We then try to balance out those proportions or find other solutions to make the characters look good from all angles and still convey the same feeling of the character as the drawings do.
Et voilà...This is Barbarossa 2000:
