We already knew this could be a large undertaking that would be constantly evolving in industry and the methods used could change all of the time. In order to get a better understanding of how things are done and what we should be trying to do, I tried to contact several industry professionals for advice and feedback on our pipelines we think we will use. These include Cheryl Austin (currently employed at Paragon Studios, NCSoft), Sze Jones (currently employed at Naughty Dog), Rich Diamant (currently employed at Blizzard Entertainment), and Nicholas Collings (currently employed at Ubisoft Montreal). This rough mood board shows some of their work, and hints at what methods they may be using already.
Copyright © Various Artists
The work of Nicholas Collings on 'Assassin's Creed' is of particular interest to us. The way they made multiple characters from only two base-meshes is exactly the sort of pipeline we plan to do to create our characters.
The above link shows a video of how they went about creating the LOD information for the game to use, another very important aspect of what we will need to do. The work done for 'Splinter Cell: Conviction' was also of this method, but with much higher polycounts, and included all body meshes; not just the head. The image above in the bottom right shows just how they put their characters together, and again, this will be something we will be looking into for our character development.
Rich Diamant's head modelling method shows us how to make a fully animate-able head for in-game use, especially with his work on 'Uncharted 2: Among Thieves'.
To help us learn we have also been able to get several training DVDs made by some of these artists, which show us exactly how they go about doing such high-quality work, and what methods they use.
