Age of Wonders III “The Anatomy of a Hero” Developer Journal

In the first of what will likely be many developer journals for Age of Wonders III, Triumph Studios character artist Nils Ruisch tells us all about the hero assets he has created for the game. Choosing 3D over 2D, picking male and female class outfits, the challenges of creating animations and character poses, and more are covered in detail:

Head

The hero heads are made by creating base heads that hold the major forms for each race. Special care is given to place edge loops in such a way that the heads can easily be deformed. To texture the heads a series of 3 UV sets would be created. The first UV set is used to assign a unique texture for each gender and race. A few of these textures are made to create diverse variations. Each base head would then be manually altered in various ways to create head shapes with personality.

The second and third UV sets are used to draw eyebrows and additional details onto the skin. These textures are shared over all the races in game, allowing us to add large amount of variation on the heroes by adding all kinds of eyebrows, scars, war paint, tattoos and burn marks.

Bodies

As I mentioned above, it was key to present different body types for each hero. We began the process by up-rezzing the base racial unit figures. Note how the proportions of each race vary vastly in shape. We then added details to skin texture and event hands.

The Class Outfits

During the creation process of hero outfits the concept artists at Triumph Studios deliver an armor design. Using this design the armor is blocked out in 3D, sculpted and detailed in Zbrush. The armors are set up in a way that makes it possible to easily add armor variations. After creating a game resolution mesh, the armors are unwrapped and textured. The resulting asset is then skinned to the rig that drives our heroes. After skinning, the outfits are wrapped around the racial bodies along with their male/female variants.

Hair

One of the most difficult objects to visualize in 3D is hair. Because of the distinctive way hair reacts to light and the restrictions we had to work with in our engine we have had to use a lot of tricks to make the hair look as good as we can. Right now we use several meshes with different materials to both shade the hair correctly and still make the edges look ‘˜fluffy’. The fun thing about the hero customizer is that we can share hair along all the races with only little effort. Some of the most awesome combinations where discovered when we ported hair from one race onto the other.

After some hefty internal debate we also did decide on not allowing beards on elves, but we do allow facial hair on female dwarves! We’re not sure if it makes these ladies more awesome, cuter or both.