How A Designer Is Using Character Creator To Develop An Ink-Paint Noir Video Game

The darkish, traditional ambiance of movie noir is usually tough to seize in video games. The duty solely turns into tougher when the selection is made to mix that movie noir aesthetic with a stylized, comic-book look. Usually the creator finds themselves restricted by their instruments. Such was the case with Madagascar-based artist, director, and sport designer Tojosoa Andoniana Andrianarison.

Andrianarison, whose artist’s title is Cid, confronted the problem of realizing his imaginative and prescient for a stylized noir sport based mostly on his brief movie Colours. The sport known as Colours:Zero. Regardless of these obstacles, Cid was in a position to get hold of an Epic MegaGrant in 2019. Nonetheless, this grant didn’t remedy one key concern: the problem of bringing such a stylized sport to life. The reply would come within the type of Reallusion’s suite of animation instruments.

Character design: evening and day

Plenty of instruments, regardless of being glorious at what they’re designed particularly for, lack fluidity and suppleness. Usually, when pursuing particular types or specialised duties, creators battle with packages which can be unable to accommodate their wants. Cid discovered himself confronted with this concern because the workload required for Colours:Zero started to take its toll, as he explains:

Earlier than utilizing Reallusion’s device, the whole lot round characters was a sort of nightmare: modeling, rigging, clothes, equipment, and animations. It took days and generally weeks to make one character at my degree.

Nonetheless, in Character Creator he discovered a program that was versatile and highly effective sufficient to satisfy his artistic and technical wants. As a substitute of spending days modeling and making use of meshes to characters, or worrying concerning the expense of hiring extra assist, Cid was in a position to make use of Character Creator to seamlessly mannequin and rig characters in his wanted model with little to no bother.

Character Creator allowed him to not solely work from a sequence of presets, but additionally modify these presets to such an extent that he may create distinctive characters in no matter model he wanted. As well as, these characters had been rigged, regardless of the parameters, and able to be posed, modeled, and clothed inside minutes. Now not was there any fear of skeletal hierarchies or root bones. Whether or not the model is photorealistic or extra artistic, as in Colours:Zero, Character Creator does away with a lot of the busy work.

Even the clothes, hair, equipment, and their physics are so simple as a single button. There may be by no means a necessity to fret about meshes conflicting, or the rigging of particular person items needing any extra work. With the usage of the Switch Pores and skin Weight setting, Cid was in a position to immediately have a personality rigged, clothed, and modeled, able to be exported for animation. He says:

Character Creator presents virtually the whole lot I have to make my characters: ready-rigged base character, stylized and detailed morphs, garments, hairs, beards, equipment, make-up, import customized meshes, and immediately rig with Switch Pores and skin Weight.

Surpassing animation limitations

With the whole lot modeled, the pure subsequent step is the export into animation. Many packages have limitations that come up at this step, with points typically coming to gentle concerning of the standard of the preliminary rigging, construction hierarchy, or the extra difficulties of facial animation. This, coupled with integration and compatibility points throughout packages, makes the method of each modeling and animation a dual-front downside.

These points are null and void when working inside Reallusion’s iClone. This system “actually supasses all these limitations,” notes Cid. With seamless integration and importing from Character Creator, the whole lot turns into fluid. When customers merely click on export, the chosen mannequin — fully rigged and suitable with not solely iClone however different animation software program as properly — is cleanly put proper into this system, able to be animated.

And it isn’t simply the bigger animations both: even the minute ones change into a stroll within the park. Mixing a number of animations, completely different gestures, and facial animations turns into very straightforward. Furthermore, the flexibility to preview and take a look at the venture in actual time is so simple as plug and play with the iClone Unreal Live Link plugin.

Each device and level wanted to totally animate any character, regardless of the model, is true on the artist’s fingertips.

With iClone, there is no such thing as a longer a have to stress about limitations or compatibility. The main target is only on the artist’s imaginative and prescient and creativity — one thing that Cid can not overstate, as he continues on his journey to show Colours:Zero right into a actuality:

Now I can focus extra on the artistic half. I even have extra time to work on different features of the venture like screenplay, UI, enhancing current options, and including new ones.

Concerning the artist

Andrianarison “Cid” Andoniana is an indie online game developer from Madagascar who can also be an animator and brief movie director. He has labored in varied fields as a freelancer together with video enhancing, vfx, animation, video mapping, and 3d modeling.

Cid is in his sixth 12 months of growth on his online game Colours:Zero, which mixes his movie and online game expertise with assist from Reallusion’s full suite of animation instruments and Unreal Engine.