Introduction to Alienbrain

[Rick Stirling]

Re-use, re-use, re-use. Work smarter and not harder.

If you picked up the D'Artiste Character book 2, then Gears of War one, you'll see how they reuse not only vast chunks of models - legs, heads etc, but smaller parts like fingers, noses, teeth, buckles, buttons, insignia.

We've got low and high poly hands for males and females. We'll reuse legs and jackets from model to model, we'll only build a few hats, then just scale and move and re-textures where needed.

You'd not build a set of hands if you've just built a perfectly good set a week before, would you?

Gears of War had perhaps a dozen main models, what I would term as A-Class models - Marcus, Dom, Baird, Cole, standard marines, standard Locust grunts, Theron, Beserkers etc. The Epic guys spent a LOT of time on these fellas, and it shows. Then they also had a small supporting cast of NPCs that you met at the civilian base.

For those main characters they spent many weeks on each model.

On projects such as GTA where you have hundreds of models, you have to work slightly differently since the turnaround on a model is much faster. You build them to populate the world, then revisit the models to not only make them look better, but also once you see the world that the environment people are creating you want to make the characters fit into the world. The branding of all the sports teams, foods, drinks and clothes shops all feeds back in to ground the characters.


So the time taken depends on the models importance in the game, and I've never worked on a game where you built and textured a model and had it be final. You always revisit to adjust and polish geometry (often for deformation), texture maps, shader values, rigging, skinning.

I could build a game ready 5k model then unwrap it, texture it with diffuse, specular and normal maps, then rig it body and face in a week. I I was building it by reusing and changing a head from one model, a torso from another, legs from another I could do two a week.

Spending a month on it? I'd get bored. Spending a block of 2 weeks on it, then another week a few months later adjusting it, then a few months later going back for a week of polishing? Thats more likely scenario and more effective that a solid 30 days non-stop.