Hello from the Chaos Bringer Development Team! :)
Building the Four Heroes · Part 2 of 6
Daisy's face was by NO MEANS made in one clean go! Though that would be any designer's dream come true, in reality, the face we know and love today emerged through an extensive series of sketches, sculpting experiments, paint-overs, and rig tests. And of course, every stage brought out its own set of challenges and specific questions that needed answering!
Right from the get-go, we knew that the early concept art sketches needed to capture the essence of Daisy's "character" first. In particular, we wanted a face that felt direct and expressive, one with enough intrinsic ability to communicate through shapes and defined edges to remain readable from the game's ever-shifting viewport. Once that direction moved into the 3D space, the questions that arose became a little bit more technical! We found ourselves asking questions such as: Which features should come from the main sculpted shapes? Exactly how much expression should come from the facial bones? And most importantly, would the face still feel like Daisy even after pushing it to its limits via facial expressions and emotes?! (A very valid worry!)
We quickly found that model topology placed quite a few constraints on the overall shaping process. Fortunately, we made those constraints work in our favour, as they challenged us to really pinpoint and flesh out the most *essential* of details! And thus we got to work adjusting things like:
- The overall head shape
- The placement of the eyes and mouth
- The planes around the cheeks
- The forehead's slow transition into the hair
At this stage, even the tiniest of changes could shift the entire impression of the character, so we repeatedly compared our sculpted model against the original idea. This was in order to give the 3D model its own life, rather than treating the original 2D sketch as a rigid blueprint.
Next up came a very important checkpoint in the process: Testing the facial rig. It's fair to say that a good neutral face is barely half a game character. The face *also* has to hold together nicely and behave relatively naturally when the character speaks, reacts, or appears in a closer shot! Testing different emotive deformations early on really helped us catch those pesky shapes that looked fine in a still render but became a LOT less convincing while in motion, to say the least, ahaha~ ^^a
We also chose to keep the hair and ears separate from the head. That decision alone gave us sooooo much more room for experimenting with different types of headgear and future equipment combinations! Although, we do have to mention that partial coverage and clipping still in case-by-case scenarios still need careful handling! o:
The current Daisy we know and love is the result of all of this back-and-forth between design and implementation (which, trust us, there was a LOT of it, especially in the early stages)! But because of that intense back-and-forth, we're proud to say that now, he's not just a finished 2D drawing translated into 3D shapes and polygons. Far from it! Now, he's a full-fledged character in his own right, one refined through the real and living conditions of the environment he's in!
What's more, that iterative process we embarked on with Daisy shone a light onto a clearer path to take in approaching the rest of the cast's designs!
In conclusion, it's safe to say that Daisy's face gave us a really good initial map to follow when it comes to the actual implementation side of character design.. but a cast can only be judged when all its members stand together, right? So in the next dev note, we'll be putting all four of our lovely heroes side by side for their first solid-shading pass! Please look forward to it!!
Thanks for coming along with us for this awesome ride!
See you in next week's dev note! ;)
Sincerely,
The Chaos Bringer Development Team