CREATE A DETAILED FANTASY CHARACTER
Arno Schmitz is the principal character artist at Guerrilla Games, currently working on Horizon Forbidden West. Previously he worked on Horizon Zero Dawn and Killzone Shadow Fall.
Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills
The goal of this project was to take a character I’ve been doodling during my high school and college years and recreate it to the best of my current abilities. Very similar to how Marvel takes existing comic book characters and evolves their design to be worthy of cinema by reimagining all the details and thinking about the functionality of the outfit. If you decide to use a concept that is not your own, be sure to credit the original artist.
The technical specifications for this project are a guess from a few years back of what I’d imagine next-gen would be. That means very clean and quite detailed game meshes that still use normal maps. An offline renderer was used to have access to raytracing. That turned out to be a very accurate prediction since that is achievable on this generation of consoles. Many 4K textures are used to texture the main elements of the character, and XGen is used in favour of hair cards since this method looks more realistic.
So this tutorial will be a journey to learn how to make a real-time cinematic character at the most cutting edge of technology. A lot of the offline rendering techniques like raytracing can be done in real-time engines now. So, for example, a character like this would be perfect for a short movie made in Unreal or Unity.
01 EXPLORE DESIGN CHOICES IN 2D
From working at a AAA game company you realise that iterating in 3D is very costly. For this reason, before undertaking a big challenge make sure you have a solid concept to
