Shardbound's Character Art Pipeline Explained

Introduction

Hello, my name is Ira Goeddel, and I am the Principal Technical Artist and Acting Art Manager. I am beyond excited about my role on the Shardbound team, having worked on a previous iteration by Spiritwalk Games in 2017, and now playing a major part in its revival by Bazooka Tango.

The members of both teams and myself have worked together in some fashion or another on multiple games over the last 18 years. Both Spiritwalk and Bazooka Tango share a deep commitment to community and game development, prioritizing players and new and exciting gameplay. When Bo and Stephan offered me the opportunity to contribute to Shardbound, it was an invitation I couldn't resist. Drawing from my experiences at Spiritwalk, I felt compelled to bring those ideas to life.

Shardbound's Character Art Team

Shardbound centralizes around a core group of senior developers who can wear a lot of hats, who then manage and utilize a worldwide network of external developers. Internally, our disciplines are organized around a Creative Director, Art Director, Technical Artists, VFX, and Producer support.

The current network of external artists working on the character team can range between 20 and 40 developers across the full gamut of art disciplines. With an average character taking nearly two months to complete, from concept to in-game, there are a lot of people involved.

Art Direction

There was an incredible amount of dedication to detail and thoughtfulness by the former art director and designers at Spiritwalk Games that set the foundation for the art direction today at Bazooka Tango. Character design goes beyond story and concept art – it's a journey of balancing what looks amazing, what the hardware can do, and most importantly what guides intuitive player decisions.

While some art decisions might be obvious, like not giving a character a large axe if they cast a fireball, others are more nuanced. Should a flying unit always necessarily need to fly so that players remember its ability? How do you make a 3' adorable Lapora character feel tanky and have 15 health? And then beyond evaluating each unit, we need to evaluate them in relation to each other. Where do we put light and dark shapes on a character to help create an internal silhouette that differentiates  it from another character of similar height and build, or how do we use the pose and speed of animation to create distinctions?

Sculpting & Modeling Characters

We aren't far from a standard industry workflow: ZBrush to Substance 3D, to Maya, to Unreal Engine. Our challenge lies within stylization. Someone smarter than me once said, "In many ways photoreal art is easier than stylized art. Stylization has some little twist at every step in the process." We definitely experience that on Shardbound.

Here’s an example showing how high the number of callouts can be in a standard round of feedback as a character moves through ZBrush blockout into final sculpting. The artist making this is clearly very talented, but must contend with a round of edits on shaping the folds and wrinkles in the character's clothing. In the world of Shardbound, which is an "altered reality", even the stylization of the clothes are non-standard – they go slightly against the rules of the real world. These little details make a huge impact in the look and feel for the player.

The Texturing Pipeline

If Substance 3D only let us paint on the model it would still be extremely crucial to the workflow. It has gotten a lot more complicated than simply choosing what color you want to paint with. Textures in today's games are 90% of their data footprint on your hard drive. Substance 3D has made it exceedingly easy for artists to be artists and crank out amazing visuals we can no longer live without. While we may be complaining for more memory on our hard drives, we certainly have Substance 3D to thank for the quality of work we put out.

For us, as a stylized game, Substance 3D's use of sharing material brushes is crucial for maintaining consistency across a distributed team, and its exporter and channel packer is great when it comes to shader optimization changes that arise later in production.

Rigging and Animation

Rigging and animation has all been done in Maya. For a small and distributed team, the major time savers for us were automation of file and information management, an auto rig for common structures, and flexible rigging tools for custom leaf structures. As an example, we only planned to make one crazy flying space lobster, so it was faster to rig most of her by hand and small tools versus wrangling an auto rigger which are primarily for bipeds.

I approached the asset pipeline striving for a balance of flexibility and systemic automation. I wanted to avoid over tooling, having tools blocking artists, and artists having to think about things that aren't art related. That balance allows us to pick our battles and get a high ROI on our time and efforts.

Advice for Aspiring Artists

• Picasso didn't start with cubism. He got there through the fundamentals. Learn the tools separately from the style. Explore stylization in 2D, pick up a pencil or stylus, whatever the kids use these days! Explore methods and treatments in 3D.
• Manage scope! Don't set out to make everything your magnum opus. Pick small projects and studies. For example – only study a hand, not an entire human. Forget erasers exist – if you mess up, don't erase, just draw it again on the same page.
• You don't have to be a starving artist! A sketchbook and pencil are really cheap and portable compared to a PC. Blender is awesome and free. I choose it over ZBrush any day of the week. 
• ArtStation has amazing communities and forums. Look at others' work, ask for critiques, stay open-minded, rinse and repeat!

Ira Goeddel, Principal Tech Artist. Shardbound is currently in development by Bazooka Tango and Immutable Games

Interview conducted by Arti Burton