Overview of 3D Pipeline

Danny Sweeny, talking about techniques he uses to make characters for the game series warhammer.

Focuses of character art are:

• Anatomy

• Cloth

• Hard surface armour/weapons

• Creatures

Character art pipeline

Generic character art pipeline

• Proxy - Character Art

• Concept - Concept Art

• Sculpt/High poly - Character Art

• Low poly - Character Art

• Baking - Character Art

• Texturing - Character Art

• Implementation - Character Art

• Rigging - Rigging/Animation

• Skinning - Rigging/Animation

• Processing - Rigging/Animation

• Testing/Bug fixing

Proxy

Proxy/Setup

• Base mesh

• Focus on silhouette

• Defines limits and extremes

• Basis for scuplts for faction

• Used by riggers to animate before art completion

Topology flow

• Good topology flow

• edge loops in correct places

• Tri's are just fine (in context)

Toplology is about the animation and how joints move. They need to look correct when the limbs are moving causing limb deformation.

Development of charactyer art for WARHAMMER - Concepts

Concepts

• Very important to character art process

• Free to explore

• Strong focus on silhouette and design

• Less time designing = more time modelling

Using references helps to make strong concepts and leads to strong artwork/models

Sculpt

Modelling and Sculpting

• Proxy used as a basis for sculpt (Quads only)

• We cannot alter extremities or add more limbs/areas of secondary animation. We need to sculpt with the skeleton in mind. This is why proxy stage is so vital.

No tris should be used in the proxy as it will negatively affect the sculpting stage. This is cause when a tri is subdivided it will go all weird. Tris should only have been used for the low poly animation so far.

Low Poly

If somethings hidden in a game, for example the head under a helmet, then you can just delete it. Efficiency is the most important thing when making the low poly.

Make sure the UV maps are done efficiently and economically.