3D Character

For ~3 last years I worked as a Lead 3d character artist at WH40K Rogue Trader (without DLCs), and here is a short breakdown of what I was responsible for:

1) To design/develop, adjust, and maintain a complex modular system of customization of in-game 3d characters. (I wasn’t responsible for weapons). The main feature of the system is the ability to combine countless numbers of character parts and give the capacity to build NPC characters with individual appearances for not artistic departments, such as level designers, game designers, etc. Combining parts similarly to the Lego constructor by choosing parts manually and/or using a randomizer with nested parts which is written by tech.art for simplification and acceleration
of processes of creation of NPCs. At the same time, most of these assets are for real-time(run-time) customization of our character’s party. Playing the game you can find many items and put them on your main character and his party companions.
Just a simplified instance:

Having them we can create numerous amount of possible combinations. In this example, it will be 5^5 = 3125 individual characters – quite many outputs with a small number of inputs. And it’s without color variants which of course will add many more combinations. The real character system of this game has many more conditional entities by meanings, with different meshes, textures, and color variants usually multiplied by the number of genders and races. It’s pretty much impossible to count and say what amount of characters with individual appearances exist or could exist. Moreover, there are many restrictions and requirements by design such as saving parts of the default looks of characters while having the ability to wear some different clothes to be able to determine which character it is and not to lose their “initial appearance” at all. Furthermore, there were some especially tough challenges for me with mechanicus and adepta sororitas when you need to give the ability to wear armour on them above the base outfit, but at the same time to save their significant parts from the base outfit above put on armours.

2) Management and art direction of the creation of 3d characters at each stage of it. Communicate and resolve working issues with numerous stakeholders from different departments such as the art director and tech.art director, 2D concept artists, game designers, riggers/skinners/animators, project managers, level designers, and narrative designers. Maintained asset lists in Google Sheets, ordered orders and their descriptions from people of responsible departments there, estimated costs and time of creating assets, searched for references, wrote technical guidelines for the character department, creating tasks for my colleagues from the character department.

Gave feedback and made fixes on each stage of character creation such as discussions/fixing of concepts to fit them into our system’s restrictions, designed character texture atlases, gave feedback/fixes at modeling stages about optimization of technical aspects of models such as their forms and decent UVs, gave artistic feedback about textures, and made overpaints if it was needed as well. Implemented assets into Unity engine, designed, created, and adjusted domestic entities for equipment and rules of their interaction between themselves, and adjusted masks and textures to achieve coherence in their look. When I had time, overseen and checked the final appearance and implementation of NPCs in in-game environments made by other departments, sometimes I rebuilt their looks and rebaked prefabs, but of course, it’s quite tough to check everything.

Thanks for:
Yulia Lykova
Denis Smyntina
Nikolay Timashev
Pavel Burmistrov
Evgeniya Sedakova
Evgeniy Kornukov

Also, I found an interesting video  with a detailed customization overview of the character customization system made by “Tales of Lumin – Character Creation & More!” channel on YouTube, there you can explore how it looks in live action. Thanks to him