Hello from the Chaos Bringer Development Team! :D
Building the Four Heroes · Part 4 of 6
After our initial solid-shading pass, we spent the next stretch of our time really delving into the specificities of each character. Meaning, a lot of our time went into refining heads via edits in the fundamental shapes and structures, smoothing out the texturing workflow, and making sure that each of our four heroes both looked and *felt* like their own individuals. At the same time, our focus was always set on maintaining clarity and character readability, all the while keeping a close eye on how our heroes kept a common visual language between them.
To our slight surprise, what really helped to make each of our characters shine wasn't the colouring, but rather the texturing! Specific textures helped to clarified the overall shapes and planes of each face, strengthened eyes + mouth readability, and gave us yet another layer to play with regarding character-specific details. In the end, we were able to come up with a complete rendering approach that allowed us to comfortably sculpt and model out noticeably different face shapes (and proportions!) instead of them all just smooshing together generically!
Looking at each character in specific, we see that Daisy's design leans into asymmetry and a more visibly weathered body. By contrast, Melania's sculpt called for a different balance of facial structuring and more attention to her hair's shape. Ysilune needed a distinct profile that would still work well with the shared facial system of our younger roster. Joyton's broader build fundamentally changed how his head, neck, and equipment had to be evaluated altogether. Looking at it through this lens, it was clear that we were no longer making isolated art choices on a whimsy. Instead, each stylistic choice we made had a fundamental effect + consequences for rigging and customisation! And as we saw in Joyton's case, the further we ran with each choice, the more effect it had on how we would need to mould and adapt to it further on down the line.
Another design choice we made was to keep the hair and ears as separate objects so that headgear can replace (or hide) them when needed. That sounds simple enough in theory, but we had some issues arise with certain gear that required partial coverage in specific.. For example, one particular style of helmet may hide only certain parts of a hairstyle, and every additional variation of helmet or hairstyle further multiplied the number of combinations we needed to test, which, though fun, became a LOT;;
Finally, when thinking about each character's face, each individual face means that the shapes and planes present required the facial bones to be positioned slightly differently! Our ultimate goal is always to preserve each character's identity as clearly as possible while also keeping all the animations we've worked so hard on both usable and consistent for each! The same principle applies to our body builds, too! Overall, we feel that shared systems are super valuable, but they should serve to support our roster rather than to flatten them out or make them look generic.
The roster we have now represents our current direction, but it's for sure not all set in stone (development is an ongoing process, after all)! Things like hair retopology, rigging, material response, and equipment compatibility all continue to shape our models. Still, we're super excited cus this was the first time we could officially introduce the heroes as a full cast of characters! Now, we can quite tangibly see the beginnings of a real roster rather than just a random collection of weirdo assets LOL
Meeting the cast also exposes the underlying systems that exist and are tailored specifically to support them. So in our next dev note, we'll step behind each character portrait and look at the modular armour system that allows us to freely swap out our equipment without totally erasing the hero underneath it!
Thanks for reading + tagging along with us!
See you in next week's dev note! ^^
Sincerely,
The Chaos Bringer Development Team