Category Character

All about character art for games. There are playable and non-playable characters (NPCs). Hero characters, which are typically provided extra visual fidelity, and characters which are deemed less important. There are animals, invented creatures, monsters, minibosses, and final bosses. Basically, if it moves and it isn't part of the environment or the user interface, it's probably a character.

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Character Process

Game characters are usually designed by a working with an Art Director or Lead Artist. A concept is a much quicker way to make large changes, helping them discover the optimal character design.

For most modern game characters, a high resolution model is created with many millions of polygons using a combination of a (i.e. 3ds Max, Maya, Modo) and a (ZBrush, Mudbox). These high resolution models are usually modeled over into a low resolution version (a process called) or otherwise reduced down to a more usable in-game resolution.

The high resolution model is usually converted into a normal map, which is a texture that stores not colors but rather mathematical vectors (a math thing that is a direction and distance in 3d space) that indicate what direction each pixel is facing, so effectively each pixel is kind of like a vertex. The "normal" in normal map comes from the term "normalized vector" which is a special kind of vector (a vector whose distance is always 1).

There are other kinds of that get used, but normal maps are a bit unique in that they are storing information related to the shape, rather than the color or material. Since these are pretty much impossible to accurately paint by hand, as they're a mathematical representation of something, people usually use a high resolution model and "bake" or "project" the normals from the high poly (where each vertex has a discrete normal) down to a texture that can be applied to the low poly.

Character Examples

• Testing the new DX11 features of ma2013.5, Youtube timelapse - Paul Tosca has released 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".
• - Wireframes of meshes used in games.
• BaseMesh - Low-resolution polygonal models that can be used as the starting point for digital sculpting.

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