Character

Character art for games.

What is a Character?

Characters are models in a game which represent humans, animals, monsters, spirits, etc.

The game player controls a "playable character" (PC) while the game controls "non-playable characters" (NPCs). Hero characters typically have extra detail, while the rest use lower resolution models and textures, to save production time and increase in-game performance.

Character Process

Characters for games are usually created as a group effort, involving an Art Director, Concept Artists, Character Artists, Technical Artists, Animators, and Effects Artists (usually in this order). The number of artists depends on the size of the art team: the team can be tens of people, or sometimes it is all accomplished by one person.

Characters are first designed as concepts, sculpted to create form and details, re-topology modeled for in-game use, textured and shaded to create color and surface materials, rigged to a skeleton, animated to move and act, and special effects are added.

Concept art is almost always used as the starting point because it's a more loose, fast, and efficient way to iterate and find the best character design than using 3D.

For most modern game characters, a high poly model is first created using a combination of modeling and digital sculpting software. These high resolution models are later re-topologized into the game resolution or low poly model.

The surface details from the high poly model are transferred to the in-game model using textures and Shaders though a process called baking. This baking process can generate a variety of texture maps that help fool the eye into believing the in-game model has more modeled detail than it actually has. The most common of these texture maps are Normal map, and AmbientOcclusionMap.

Character Examples

• The Great 3D Game Art Giveaway Thread! Polycount Forum thread.
• Argonaut (Game Asset) by Gavin 'Gav' Goulden, "Originally created for my presentation with Marmoset at GDC2015. Covering PBR materials and real time rendering for portfolios with the Toolbag 2. In this download, you get my Marmoset scene (lighting setup, material setup), textures (created in ddo and tweaked later), and low poly model. Free / by donation - looking for feedback for future tutorials and assets." More models from Gavin on Gumroad.
• Testing the new DX11 features of ma2013.5, Youtube timelapse by Paul "paultosca" Tosca, sharing the source files for his Nyra character "to help others that might be on the road to becoming game character artists and want to check out the model/textures/psd layout".
• P&P - SDK THREAD Polycount Forum thread, models to practice texturing with.
• SkankerzeroModularCharacterSystem - By Jesse 'skankerzero' Sosa, Polycount Wiki page, how to create a modular character system.
• Roguedevelopmentdiary - By Lee 'almighty_gir' Devonald, Polycount Wiki page, sharing his female superhero creation process, step by step.
• BaseMesh - Low-resolution models that can be used as the starting point for CharacterSculpting.
• Category:Topology - Wireframe screencaptures of meshes used in games.

More Information

• Anatomy Reference
• Character Modeling
• Character Reference
• CharacterSculpting
• CharacterTexturing
• ReTopologyModeling
• Subdivision Surface Modeling
• Topology

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