Art Director Phil Shenk explains the creative process behind the creation of a modern day Templar Knight. @ PC.IGN.COM

After E3… after showing a game… I usually feel a tiny let-down. We had an amazing show, and there's so much immediate, insane, excited energy at the booth that coming home and relaxing feels like a bit of a crash. Not only that, but also leading up to it is almost a month of intense preparation; late nights and weekends of adrenaline (and caffeine) fueled crunch. Working like mad to get every little last bit of love into the game for its big debut. It's definitely all worth it though; it was incredibly fulfilling to see lines of people waiting to play our game. Equally cool were the fans that planted themselves in front of a screen to play through the randomly generated levels for hours. We all came back with a great feeling of validation that Hellgate: London was really starting to come together!

So anyway, the rush of being at E3, of showing a hugely successful game, is a hard act to follow. Now it's back to work and back to the drawing board. Back to the task of creating the minions of Hell, the heroes set on driving them back, and the weapons they use to kick their ass.

As Art Director for the characters, monsters and weapons, my job consists mostly of writing descriptions, looking at designs, approving (and rejecting) work, making plans and schedules, and tracking lists. While all of that sounds kind of boring, the reality of it is much cooler. I'm the guy that comes up with the crazy creatures and butt-kicking characters. Of course, I don't do it alone… far from it. We've got a team of world-class concept artists, modelers, animators and texture artists that do the real work. Mostly, I just smack the figurative horse to get the wagon started, then hold the reigns to keep it on track.

For me, the big push leading up to E3 was getting the male Templar character in the game, in third-person view. Up until then, we only had a first-person view, which also meant that we had no way of seeing character. Being a character guy, that irked me, so I was pretty motivated to get the player model in and running around… and the big challenge… get him looking cool!

Getting the third-person character in the game was kind of an obsession for me since we started this project. Personally, I like to see the character I'm playing on the screen, and I also knew that melee combat would only really come together with a third-person view. I knew that to sell the idea, it had to be done right, and for this to happen, a lot of pieces had to come together at the same time. The showing at E3 represented a convenient milestone for this, and honestly, it was past due. The whole process of getting this first character up and running was over a year in the making!

Finding the Look

The design of the Templar class was a challenge from the beginning. It's one of those things where I had a good idea in my head what he should feel like, but I was having trouble coming up with the specifics. I knew that the Templar were supposed to feel like modern-day (or near-future) knights. But they couldn't feel archaic; they had to feel bad-assed to a modern audience. We knew that there was the potential risk that the design could be either too fantasy-looking or too generically sci-fi. The whole design process was a delicate balancing act between these two extremes.

I used several concept artists on the design, both in-house and contractor. I like getting a lot of ideas from different minds, as opposed relying on one artist (including myself). This is especially true if the core vision is vague or I'm having difficulty nailing down a look. In this case, the challenge was finding the perfect mix between the historic and the modern, the arcane and the technical. Even though I had a strong vision, finding the exact recipe was defiantly a challenge.

The idea in the written description was that the Templar had secretly stayed in a continuous state of preparation for almost a thousand years. All during that time, they developed demon-fighting accoutrements with whatever technology was currently state-of-the-art. Since they were never concerned with fighting a conventional war of guns and bullets, their focus remained on augmenting and protecting the solo champion, in close-quarters combat, against a demonic foe. Magically enhanced plate armor and sword remained the kit of choice, and although the materials, technology and manufacturing process improved over time, the basic aesthetic always harkened back to an original design.

The mantra to the concept artists became "classic forms with modern materials and details". There was a lot of back and forth, and it took a long time before we started to narrow in on something that felt right. A lot of the early designs were too much like standard archaic plate armor, others were too much like generic sci-fi power armor. Finally, a design by one of the artists hit home, and that became the basic keystone for the whole class. There were further iterations for sure, but it was very important to have a base design that embodied the feeling I was after.

I'm really happy with the final design. It feels right for the Templar, like it was made by highly skilled artisans that have been trained by a continuous line of masters for dozens of generations. At the same time, it feels perfectly potent in a modern setting; the subtle bits of electronic lights, the glimpses of a high-tech bodysuit between the joints, make it feel like it's up to snuff in a sci-fi world. It also successfully latches on to an immediately recognizable archetype; one look at that armor and you know these guys are the big, tough knights!

Dressing up a Paperdoll

Design-wise was challenge enough, but because the male Templar was the first version of the first class, we also had a bunch of technical issues to figure out. For starters, we knew that we wanted a lot of variety in the looks of the characters, and this meant building a system where we could easily combine different parts from different armors in a wide variety of combinations. If we did the job right, we could easily get hundreds, if not thousands, of possible arrangements.

The main technical considerations had to do with engine efficiency. If we were to just start adding models to the player, and they each had their own texture map, we would quickly start to choke the rendering pipeline, especially when we had lots of players on the screen and they were all wearing different items. The other way of doing it (the way we decided to go) is to combine, at runtime, all the different parts into one model, and combine all the different textures into one "sheet". The downside of this is that every player has a unique texture that can't really be shared. The upside is that each player will only have one texture. It's predictable, and you know exactly how the burden on the engine will scale. You also are free to add as much stuff on the player as you like, including subtle things like changing skin color, hair color, adding tattoos, etc., at no additional cost.

(I should note here, for those who care, that when I say "one texture" I really mean "one set of textures". Each player has a diffuse map, a specular map, a self-illumination map, and a normal map.)

We decided to test the early technology on the monster called "Flesh Eater" because it was simpler than a full player character, it was humanoid, and it would benefit from having a wide variety of looks. When you see a crowd of zombies running at you, it kind of ruins the effect if they each look exactly like the other. Doing a trial run with the tech in this way turned out to be a wise move for a lot of reasons. We learned a lot about how to set up the models and textures, and we were more able to wrap our heads around how exactly the system could be used to create the huge variety of looks that we wanted to have for the player character.

What we have now for the players is kind of a paperdoll system. Each "suit" of armor is divided up into sections. The game engine can take any section from any suit and put it on the character. That section then replaces the section "underneath" it, as well as a portion of the player model texture. Each time a player equips an inventory item, the game logic checks to see what section(s) of what suit(s) that item will put on the character. It then removes the sections and parts of the texture that are currently on the character model, and swaps in the new ones. It's an amazingly powerful system, and there a few other parts that make it even cooler. We have to keep some secrets!

You Gots to Move!

Three weeks before E3, the Templar was designed, several armor suits were built and he was all textured. It was getting tantalizingly close to having a fully functional character in the game, but he still wasn't living up to his potential. All we had were some basic animations so he could move around a little. What we needed was to get him holding all the different kinds of guns and swinging swords. Even better would be if he could hold a gun and swing a sword! And why not hold two guns while we're at it?

Of course if you add it up, there are tons of combinations if one has to do every movement animation in every weapon pose. Additionally, we wanted to have the character attack while moving, which is easy for guns, but harder for swords. To really get it to look right, the character has to change his whole posture as the sword moves from one side of the body to the other. This, we figured, would require several different versions of all the movement animations.

We spent some time, and figured out a system of blending different parts of different animations to create the proper movement in the proper pose. The result, particularly for melee, is fantastic. The character easily and naturally swings his sword back and forth while running forward, backward, and side to side. He can hold a pistol in the other hand, hold the sword in a ready position on either side of his body, and attack at any time. It feels totally fluid, and it's very satisfying to run into a horde of demons and hack them to bits while shooting at them with a pistol in your off-hand. It's exactly right for the Templar class, which emphasizes melee combat and wading into the fray.

Authoring all these animations was a big project, and we spent a lot of time figuring out the best way of doing it. We are a 3D Studio Max shop, so we started out using Character Studio, since it's now free with a Max 7. I've been a long time user of Character Studio, so I'm used to all it's quirks, but others are not quite so forgiving. We ran into several issues trying to come up with a system for previewing blends inside of Max. But none of them were really working for us. In the end, we took a brute force approach that wasn't very efficient, but got the job done for the show. We've just begun to look at alternative solutions that will make our job easier. So far Character Animation Toolkit, looks like a much better alternative.

Wrap it up

So, it all came together for the show, and it was a lot of work for a lot of people. In the aftermath, I (personally) feel a little glazed over. Like I said, it takes a few days to come down off that high, and get productive again. Luckily, a lot of the hard groundwork is done, so now comes the fun stuff!

There are more armor suits to make, special character moves for all the Templar skills, there's the female version to create (check out the cinematic… HOT), and more character classes to produce. I haven't even talked about the weapons or the monsters or the cinematics… they all need pretty much constant attention. It's a wonderful job though; it's fantastic and exciting to see it all come together. We've got a great team, and we are really starting to hit our stride. More then every, after this successful showing at E3, I feel like we've got a fantastic, unique opportunity to make a great game!



Source: http://pc.ign.com/articles/624/624502p3.html