Big Arm Man - Our Character

In this post I’m going to detail the thought process behind the development of the character in our game, and the working process to create him, to hopefully give everyone a bit more of an insight into our big-armed friend.

The nature of Arms Race’s gameplay and the timeframe which we have to create the game meant that we decided to go with having a single character that is the same for all four players. For distinction between players we decided that our character would be wearing huge gloves and some other simple clothing. This was so that the whole colour of each player’s character’s clothes could be changed in engine within the material. We thought about overalls, hats, and all sorts of things to go along with the gloves, but in the end we decided to go with gloves, basic pants, and tattoos covering most of his upper body. The shoes are the same for all players.

The design of our character – let’s name him Jonathon – ended up the way it is because we decided we wanted him to be large enough on the screen that you don’t get lost; we wanted him to be comical in a cartoony way; we wanted him to look funny when he was running; and we wanted him to look like someone who could move big crates if he wanted to. From there we came up with the idea of “huge arms – tiny everything else”.

Once we had those parameters decided upon, I set to work roughing out some proportions in Photoshop. Once I had something that I thought was ridiculous enough I went into ZBrush and started sculpting him out.

I started my ZBrush sculpt by aligning his proportions with ZSpheres, and once I had them roughly right, converted them to a mesh with the second sub-division level. I exported this mesh as an obj and sent it over to Corrigan so he could start getting things going for the eventual skeleton and rig. I proceeded to sculpt out Jonathon’s musculature from the ZSphere mesh. Once I had his hands done I masked them out except for the fingertips and extracted them out to a nice chunky thickness to make gloves – I did the same thing for the pants.

Once I had conferred with the others about how he looked and gotten the go-ahead, I exported Jonathon out of ZBrush and into Maya to start re-topologising. I used some of the original ZSphere mesh to start the re-topo around the hips and torso and went from there. Once finished I sent that version over to Corrigan for him to continue with his skeleton and rig. Then I UV unwrapped and baked the muscle detail down from the high-poly ZBrush sculpt to the low-poly retopo. I used the channels from the bent normal map that was generated in xNormal to layer some shadows over a skin tone in Photoshop.

We wanted to use emissive textures on our character in the engine to make him stand out from the environment, so once I had the base texture from the bake, I set up some generic lighting in Maya, and used ‘Transfer Maps’ to bake that lighting information from one copy of the model with a lit shader on it, to another copy that had an emissive shader on it.

Once I had the lighting in the texture, I took Jonathon into Mari to project the tattoo designs onto his upper body. I projected the design into a separate layer and then exported the maps, and put them together in Photoshop, where I made sure they were desaturated and were roughly 75% grey (yet still underneath the lighting layers). They needed to be grey so the colour tint in engine worked properly.

All while this was happening Corrigan had completed the skeleton and rig, and then I painted in his skin weights and we set to animating.

The animations needed to be extremely exaggerated so that the player innately would feel like they were having fun while controlling him. The run animation ended up with his arms flailing around, and Jonathon achieved Hulk-like status with his smash/ground-pound move, where he leaps into the air and then slams the ground with his mighty fists.

Overall the procedure of creating Jonathon went rather well, except for a few minor hiccups along the way with certain files becoming corrupted. Even so it was satisfying once we were able to get him into the game with all his textures and animations, and have players come in and run around in our game like big-armed, flailing idiots. From playtesting one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we have received is people’s fondness of Jonathon, and that he really made the game fun and set the vibe for the whole experience which was really cool to hear.

#development #character #art #design #animation