Someone stole my notes!!

I just got back from the educational day at the Develop conference in Brighton (england, uk). It was a bit of a weird day, but I wanted to post some info that I thought was interesting to GG's community.

There was a talk by Epic's Chris Wells, senior character artists on GOW and UT3. Anyway, I took a whole crapload of notes, unfortunately some bugger whipped the freebie bag I'd put the notes in for safekeeping, so this is going to have to be from memory.

One of the interesting things was to hear what kind of polycounts and texture counts they were using on GOW.

I'm sure you can get a lot of this info online, so feel free to do some digging of your own. But here are the figures as I recall them.

They start off with a reference model, basically a low poly reference figure (male, female), which is only used for proportion reference.

Then they build a scratch model, which is a basic (well, he called it basic, looked bloody fantastic to me) low poly model to start from. They then export this model into mudbox or zbrush to add in detail. Before doing that, he says that they figure out which parts to use which texture on. So he says that they basically they split up the UT models by having "organic" on one texture, "hard shell" on another (armour) and "common" on another. Common being tubes and stuff.

So, they perform the unwrapping and use some tool (which I cant recall) to relax the UV's, whatever the hell that means :) hahahaa. Ehem.

So basic UV layout using Deep UV. Texturing comes from reference on 3DSK etc and is applied using Deep Paint.

He talked a bit about how he adds detail to the armour using double chamfering and whatnot, but that was TOTALLY beyond me, I'm sure its a well known max trick.

So anyhow, once they have the low poly ref in zbrush or mudbox, they add lots of detail etc. He says they usually get up to about 8 million poly's or so. Oh, he said to remember to create your models using quads so that the normal mapping and zbrush stuff works better.

He did mention that some models go higher, up into the 30 million poly mark. Guess it is to taste :)

Once the details are added to the high poly mesh, now is the time to get that back into Max. Nows the fun part. Due to some weird reasoning, they use OBJ format for saving out the high poly model. Unfortunately there is a relatively low limit on the vertex count in an OBJ file, so they have to break down the model in zbrush into model sets. He basically selects an area of the model and saves it out seperately (face, hands, etc etc).

He mentioned a program called poly cruncher, which is a poly reduction tool. I think it runs within max to reduce the high poly cage before its used in the normal mapping process (not entirely sure why, maybe a speedup thing).

So imagine you have the high poly mesh and the low poly mesh underneath it. Then they basically bake a number of textures using max's render to texture (things like diffuse layer, ambient occlusion, normal map, copy of AO used to start off the spec map).

Seems they have something like diffuse, fresnel, specular, normal and one other map. Most of those are at 2048x2048 res.

Interestingly they do fiddle with the baked maps. Its not just a bake and forget thing. Touch ups and highlights etc.

The "final" low poly model, is tweaked from low poly they used to export to zbrush and usually comes in around 13k triangles although he said that they have topped out at 30k triangles for a complex character before.

So, there you go.. normal mapped stupidly good looking character process!

What other unique tidbits did he have?

1) Save time by doing "paintovers" rather than modelling. - This was a nice one, basically, instead of modelling detail, especially if you dont really know what you want from a final model but still dont want to be a slave to your reference or concept art, try doing a paintover on your reference (male female) mesh. A paintover is simply a quick 2d paint sketch over the top of a rendered image rendered from your reference mesh. So for instance, you have your reference female up in max/maya, you render a front shot, then you simply paint detail onto that reference until youre happy with what you have. THEN you model that detail.

2) Study anatomy and life drawing skills. - His background was as an anatomy artist, make sure you do lots of quick sketching (20-30 mins) of figures in different poses. His 30 minute sketches were pretty bloody amazing btw :)

3) Make sure to look at how characters actually pose themselves in different situations. Draw simple figures in quick sketches (like stick figures really) to capture those poses from memory. Try and get a vocabulary going of those poses and see where the anatomy comes in.

I'm sure there was a load more useful info, including book references he highly recommends. Unfortunately I cant tell you, because of the note-stealer!

However, hope is not lost, as they promised to put the slides up online for the talks. So once they do that I'll link here for reference.

The rest of the talks were either inspiring (Matt S from EVO) or annoying (Matt from EA, but for a different reason). Lots of the speakers talked about how they are looking for diversity and want to have developers think more "mainstream". I think theyre problem is mostly that they dont fundamentally believe it :) If they did, they'd not be trying to recruit industry experienced devs all the time right? They'd be talking to girls schools or something. Bah!

Anyway, sorry, lots of rambling drivel, I'm tired and it was a dull 5 hour train journey back. Now I'm off to veg out before heading off for a few days.

I'd post some of those lovely images of the UT3 models (oh man, they had a 30k poly WEAPON) but.. you can go and google em.

Oh, no work on the tools stuff this week. Busy :)