ART DIRECTING 3D CHARACTER
PROPORTION
In the world of Chernobog, we designed LONGER LEGS & ARMS to not only create a heroic proportion, but also to make the character feel slightly creepy. Every creature & character in the game is designed to feel self-similar in a slightly threatening way.. as though even our protagonists are “of our horror world”
They were created using a proprietary impasto painting technique I developed & taught the team. That, combined with normal painting & faceted sculpting provides a painterly texture which fit our overall IP goals of aiming at “traditional art feel”
The character is slightly faceted and a bit too skinny (it’s a game with survival elements) - but morphs into a fat, muscular, & even skinnier version.
Our overweight bodies are skinny at the joints where the fascia folds are for extra creepiness, & every character has too much skin around the knees etc.
In Chernobog - we have over 5000 persistent NPC’s - & while they’re LOD’ing in a low resolution simulation layer, we still needed to keep polycount pretty low.
That means our players are in at about 27k polys total, including armor- & we separated out their body parts so when armor is worn, we can delete the chest, arms, etc & save on performance.
Our character has a full suite of facial morphs & also expression morphs (expressions shown below) to create the sense that our NPCs are real living beings.. & support the in-game mechanic of mood extrapolating into meaningful gameplay.
Our base body’s faces were designed with LARGE & EXPRESSIVE eyes, so that their expression can be seen from further distances (we’re in a 3D, 3rd person camera world) (alt heads not shown below)
ANTAGONISTS
Our enemies feel like they’re almost mutated or haunted versions of our main NPCs. Our Shepherd, seen below, utilizes all the same techniques as our characters- impasto, normal painting, & subtle color jitter to feel like he belongs in our world.
