How to: Character Creation System Overview #1 (Patreon)

I'm going to try something a little bit different this week.  Over the years as I've been learning game development I've always relied heavily on free resources and I get the impression that some of those resources are drying up.  I figured I'd try giving something back and also give people a more in depth view of how I make things.
Just a quick disclaimer!  Nothing that I'm going to write is going to be the 'best' or 'only' way of doing things.  There's a million different ways to arrive at a similar endpoint and there are advantages and disadvantages to all of them.  My professional background is all in 3d character modeling and even there working with other professionals, on the same art style, in the same game, everyone would have wildly different workflows.  

Last thing!  The new build should be out next week (unless something goes terribly wrong)!!!  

Also I want to give credit to the creator of the original basemesh that I use all the time.  In the first screenshot image above the basemesh that is highlighted green is Arshlevon's Basemesh.  http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/BaseMesh 

How to create a character editor Part 1

I'm going to do a really brief overview of the character editor system in Feign.  Hopefully this can help other people with their own projects.  There are also a bunch of ways to do this.  I'm leaning heavily on my personal strengths and experience as a character modeler and sculptor and much less on the tech art side of things.

Feign started out as a Skyrim mod but I quickly realized that working with the limitations of Skyrim modding was going to be more of a headache then I felt like dealing with (I have complicated feelings about this still. It turns out remaking everything from scratch has also been a headache at times).  But Skyrim's body types were the base inspiration for how I'm handling the body type system in Feign.  

In Skyrim they have a male and female body which then each have 2 body shapes.  There's a thin and a thick male and a thin and thick female.  This means that for any armor set there needs to be 4 different shapes.  I wanted to support more body shape variety in Feign while also trying to not go too crazy with the amount of work that would be required for each armor set.  I settled on making 5 different body shapes in total.  The skinny base body, a heavily muscled body, an overall thick body, a curvy lower body, and a well endowed chest body.  Since I'm not differentiating between a defined male and female body type this setup allows for a lot more variety in body type with only a bit more work than the 4 body type system that is in Skyrim.

For software I'm using Maya, Zbrush, and Photoshop.  I already have versions and experience with all this software from my day job and contract work.  There are alternatives out there and I've heard good things about software like Blender (which is a free alternative for a 3d package).  This is just the software that I'm using because it's already installed and I'm really familiar with it.  

Planning

The first step is figuring out how many body types and what shapes you'd like to support.  The more body types and shapes you support the more work it's going to be for each and every piece of armor or clothing that will need to fit that body.  Also plan ahead for how many sections you'd like to break that armor and clothing down into.  I'm only supporting a helmet, gloves, and fullbody in Feign.  In Skyrim they split it into helmet, gloves, boots, and body but then they have a ton of edge case scenarios for hoods, and robes.  Think of where these splits need to be and how you'll support them.

Quick side note:  On body sections.  I've seen setups where this wasn't thought through.  For example where for pants they had high waist, low waist, and lower waist as well as trying to support pouches and belts.  This system was horrible to deal with and trouble shoot.  It was hours of someone sitting in the character editor and testing each shirt top against each pant variant to see where things didn't match up or were causing errors and then going back and editing geometry to fix something that would then cause an error with another outfit.  Or adding in another "rule" to make this piece disappear when this specific shirt was loaded.  It was time that could've been spent on making new content instead of struggling against the system.

So I'd recommend figure out exactly what you want from the outfit system and why.  Then stick very strictly to those guidelines.  Even then there will always be clipping or penetration through different outfit pieces or character elements.  

Modeling

Now that you have you body shapes planned out it's time to start modeling.  I prefer starting with a base mesh personally.  In fact I've been using Arshlevon's basemesh (this is the green highlighted wireframe model in the first screenshot) for years at this point.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/BaseMesh 

Then figure out what the proportions are on your base body type.  In my system I wanted everything to fit the same skeleton.  This meant not moving the joints or proportions after they were fixed.  The shoulders, hips, etc would always need to bend from the same location regardless of how thick the body type gets.  

Sculpting

Then start sculpting.  I realize this is a lot like the "draw the rest of the owl" meme.  But going in depth on sculpting is a whole entire series of tutorials and a ton of practice.  Polycount used to be my go to for a lot of resources and still has a lot of useful information.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/CharacterSculpting 

Retopology

The biggest thing to keep in mind when doing the retopology is that all of these body types need to share the same topology!  This is what allows for the different sliders that I'm using in-game and lets people mix and match the different shapes.  

To get started I brought some lower subdivision levels into Maya and started making geometry.  Trying to keep clean edge loops and planning ahead for deformation.  The biggest headache was adding enough localized detail in areas that would need to be smooth and curvy even when scaled up a ton like the chest and butt.  This took a bit of trial and error to get right!  

Also keep in mind that blendshapes are a linear deformation.  So when a vertex moves from one shape to another those in between shapes will be an average of the 2 base shapes.  It can get confusing to keep track of where everything is moving to with all 5 different body shapes so I tried to plan for how the different shapes would each mix together.  

Dropping another link to Polycount here regarding retopology stuff: 

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ReTopologyModeling 

And that is the foundation of the character editor system!  Next time I'll very briefly go over rigging and then get into setting up the blendshapes in game.  

But let me know what you think of this sort of thing!  Would you like to see more how-to stuff?  Should I go more in depth on specific things?  Was anything unclear in this write up?