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Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills

Arno Schmitz walks you through the steps of designing a character worthy of a leading role in a next-gen video game

The goal of this project was to take a character I’ve been doodling during my high school and college years and recreate it to the best of my current abilities. Very similar to how Marvel takes existing comic book characters and evolves their design to be worthy of cinema by reimagining all the details and thinking about the functionality of the outfit. If you decide to use a concept that is not your own, be sure to credit the original artist.

The technical specifications for this project are a guess from a few years back of what I’d imagine next-gen would be. That means very clean and quite detailed game meshes that still use normal maps. An offline renderer was used to have access to raytracing. That turned out to be a very accurate prediction since that is achievable on this generation of consoles. Many 4K textures are used to texture the main elements of the character, and XGen is used in favour of hair cards since this method looks more realistic.

So this tutorial will be a journey to learn how to make a real-time cinematic character at the most cutting edge of technology.

A lot of the offline rendering techniques like raytracing can be done in real-time engines now.

So, for example, a character like this would be perfect for a short movie made in Unreal or Unity.

01  EXPLORE DESIGN CHOICES IN 2D

From working at a AAA game company you realise that iterating in 3D is very costly. For this reason, before undertaking a big challenge make sure you have a solid concept to base your project on. In this case the aim was to recreate a character I often sketched in high school.

Whenever you spot areas that could be upgraded during the modelling phase, do some sketches or paintovers first.

02  BLOCK-IN THE CHARACTER

At this stage your goal is to quickly get an accurate representation of your character. Apply some shaders close to the right colour and specular response. This will help to get a good impression of your model at an early stage.

First focus on the big shapes, then continuously refine the shapes by adding secondary detail. When adding more detail, try to build on your previous big shape decisions, instead of changing them.

This scene will serve as a hub for your progress and will continuously be updated.

03  CHECK FOR ANY ARTICULATION PROBLEMS

Before investing any effort into making an intricate model, it is best to do a sanity check by articulating the character through a bunch of extreme poses. This is called a ROM (Range of Motion).

For this character, after doing the ROM, the armour plates had to be adjusted. The shoulder plates now have a lip so the spikes have enough clearance when the arms are raised. The bracer is now segmented to allow forearm rotation. The back of the cuirass is now separated so there is enough mobility for the final pose where he is crouched forward.