We recently introduced a new Usual June character in our newsletter and our socials! Frankie is a ghost, and she’s an important part of June’s adventures. Read on to learn more about her design!
Now that you’ve met Frankie, we can finally talk a bit about how we’ve been making ghosts for Usual June! Without saying too much, ghosts in Usual June serve as key historical resources, so making Frankie appear believably from another time was very important to us! We also wanted her to look really really cool.
Art Director Amelia Herman did a lot of research to make Frankie’s design historically accurate: “Design-wise, the goal was to tease apart the greaser stereotype and find the actual people and cultural groups behind it, not just designing around the decades-old 1980s rehash of a 1950s stereotype. So this led to a bit of a dive on fashion and the pre-Chicano movements of the 1940s– Frankie’s bouffant became a lot more intentionally referential, her pants baggier (a la zoot suit) and a rose bolo places her more specifically in a time and culture and offers a tie (ha) to her family/surname.”
3D Character Artist Laura Beach had to solve a number of challenges to bring Frankie to life in-game, and her bouffant hair was one of the first: “My earliest version of it was a rough high poly sculpted block out of the overall form that I then created strips of polys that conformed to the overall shape and flow. I made a simple glowing shader with a gradient that colored these hair strips based on their UV maps. But of course, static hair on a ghost is going to look strange, and when we decided we wanted it to move, it became clear these hair strips weren’t up to the task.” After some trial and error, Laura came up with Frankie’s current look: “I decided to break down the hair into chunks that were solid pieces at the top but separated out towards the ends. The current version has much more definition to the hairstyle and has a subtle floaty movement which adds to the ghost feeling.”
Since Frankie was one of the first ghosts the team worked on, she became a test case for designing ghosts in general. Amelia recalls the process of “working from riffs on thermal imaging/film negatives, to spectral flames and see-through skeletons, to the more final phantom smoke look” to determine how our cast of ghosts would appear. For Laura, this meant work on shaders: “One of the main aspects of the way our ghosts look is that they have their own built in lighting. This lighting is directional and colorful often having one color lighting the mesh from above and one from below. This not only adds to the idea that they are otherworldly but it helps to add form whilst allowing the ghost to be overall quite dark and almost blend in with the background. At some point we decided that the ghosts should look less corporeal, and as they were already supposed to float, it made sense for their lower bodies to fade into nothing. Don’t need feet if you aren’t walking after all! My solution was to remove the feet, cap the ankles and add alpha to the shader that flickers and ripples like flames up and down the legs. There’s also an effect that sort of resembles an aurora borealis movement across the legs which adds to the sense of something otherworldly.”
There’s a lot more to say on this topic, so stay tuned for more details in future updates!