It's [b]Skywatch[/b] time! This week, we want to take you through our character building journey! In most modern videogames, the player character, your avatar, acts as your persona in the game. Some narrative games have scripted characters with their own pre-established identities (think Geralt from the Witcher series, or Nathan Drake in the Uncharted games) but in [b]Lost Skies[/b], your character is a blank slate for you to customise and make your own. We'll delve more in to what customisation options will be available in a future [b]Skywatch[/b], but today we'll take you through some of the earlier stages of how our character is developing. [h2][b]Moodboard[/b][/h2] First up, below is a glimpse of one of our Miro moodboards, which shows some of the character pieces our artists were using for reference early on. [img]https://i.imgur.com/3NvUBhH.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/3NvUBhH.png[/img] Our artists looked at character designs from a range of games and other media for reference and inspiration. Obviously, [i]Worlds Adrift[/i] played a part in shaping our character designs, but we also looked at games like Sea of Thieves, Breath of the Wild, NieR: Automata and Horizon Zero Dawn to name a few. As you can see in the moodboard, there were a lot of tribal and nomadic inspirations behind our early character designs, but due to the new lore that's being written for [b]Lost Skies[/b], we also wanted to incorporate more advanced technology in our world than what we had in [i]Worlds Adrift[/i], so we aimed to merge more tribal style clothing (lots of cloth and leather garments with flowing elements, cloaks/scarves etc.) with strong sci-fi elements such as metal plates and techy gadgets (think Horizon Zero Dawn). [h2][b]Original Character Exploration[/b][/h2] Below is a look at our early original character - this character model was always intended to be a placeholder, which we would iterate on until we achieved the style that we were aiming for. Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn was the main inspiration for the outfit, as she wore chunky boots and wrist accessories that bulked up her silhouette and made her feel more "weighty". The cloth around her waist contributed to that effect too. This would also translate into better looking physics and animations during grapple and swing animations. We began by exploring how this effect could be achieved with different concept outfits from different cultures and climates. [img]https://i.imgur.com/U2FY8Ea.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/CcTAl9T.jpg[/img] From the concepts above, the bottom middle outfit was chosen for the next stage of concepting, and received a colour and shading pass. [img]https://i.imgur.com/D6tk65S.png[/img] [h2][b]Original Character Render[/b][/h2] And below is the original render of our initial character model. This model was never meant to be an example of a finished, polished model or sculpt. This was made to test proportions, animations, and materials/shaders in-build. [img]https://i.imgur.com/vedAneQ.png[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/RaCjwsR.png[/img] [h2][b]Hair and Cloth Physics[/b][/h2] Below is a look at some of our early hair physics on our OG character model. Tom, one of our developers, wrote a super lightweight verlet physics solution, which actually turned out looking pretty cool and so has since been developed further. We had a couple of existing options for hair/cloth physics: UnityCloth and BoungKit, but both of these solutions came with drawbacks that made them less than ideal for our purposes. UnityCloth has a couple of disadvantages for our uses in this instance: firstly, it doesn't work great for meshes with larger internal volumes like hair, it's mostly useful for flat objects, and secondly, the execution time of the simulation is not controllable, so if it doesn't line up with our update by chance you get a visible 'pop'. BoingKit keeps the mass in check, but for some reason had this odd effect of stretching the first node in the chain. Tom couldn't find any settings to get round this. The custom solution handily fixes all of those things. Additionally, it's much more resource friendly than UnityCloth. [previewyoutube=eq2BnPe5jyk;full][/previewyoutube] [h2][b]Takeaways from this model:[/b][/h2] [h3][b]Positive[/b][/h3] [list] [*] After a coat of paint her face turned out quite nice [*] The scarf and hair worked very well with Tom’s cloth physics system, and added secondary animation to the model [*] The tint maps worked well [*] Did it’s job well for early prototypes and allowed for experimentation [/list] [h3][b]Negative[/b][/h3] [list] [*] The thick cloth skirt was a pain to model and rig [*] The proportions of the outfit could have been pushed much further, the team decided they wanted to go in more on the stylization for future iterations [*] The hair was similarly arduous to sculpt and retop, the team wasn’t completely satisfied with the result [*] The underlying anatomy ended up slightly odd as it was designed for the outfit on top of it [/list] [h3][b]Next steps:[/b][/h3] [list] [*] Deeper research and concepting to solidify art direction for characters (texture, anatomy, stylization) [*] Concept male body type [*] Research eye shaders to help them look lively in engine [*] Rework the base sculpt with stronger style [*] Adjust proportions [/list] Our team took these learnings forward into the concepting stage for our new character model, which you can read more about in the full blog post over on the [b]Lost Skies[/b] website. [h1][b][url=https://lostskiesgame.com/news/skywatch-8-player-characters-part-1-character-building]To see how our new character model is developing and to read the rest of this blog post, head on over to the official Lost Skies website by clicking here![/url][/b][/h1]