How much work to mod a fully animated leader?

Assuming Civ VI will allow you to mod in fully animated leaders, how long would that take for someone to create a fully animated leader of the same quality of the ones that we've seen? Just curious to see whether this is actually something that is feasible, which could cure a ton of issues with missing civs leaders etc

If they could do it in Civ 5, they'll do it in 6 (although I think only 3 or 4 were completed).

We will get some, I think... more if it's easier than Civ V. I'm hoping to beg a lot as I do not have the skills.

why not import Civ5 leaders into Civ6?
They were of superior quality anyway. These new ones are quite grotesque

Many modders want to maintain the theme, both for units and leaders. I, for one, don't care. Themore variety the better. If they convert easily... well, beggars can't be choosers.

I still think there are some Civ V leaders that would fit alright with the Civ VI style.

Me too. Denmark's leader and the Indonesian guy come to mind. Not a 3d artist, but how difficult would it be to make a few facial features more caricature like? And add a bit of puffiness to the fingers and hands? Even a script might be able to do that, I suspect.

How much work to mod a fully animated leader? Kinda like - How long is a piece of string.

There's not enough known on what's required yet. What the allowable poly res, texture res, bones, morphs etc.

Well it' s 64 bit game, with something like a beefed up FiraxisLORE engine, that's all that's known.

If you discount the engine side of things and just look at the characters, and try to replicate something similar, I can only say it depends on what you already know. If your starting from scratch with no experience what so ever, then quite a lot of work. If your a pro already, who know's? Only a pro would know, but obviously a lot less work.

Craig_Sutter said:

Me too. Denmark's leader and the Indonesian guy come to mind. Not a 3d artist, but how difficult would it be to make a few facial features more caricature like? And add a bit of puffiness to the fingers and hands? Even a script might be able to do that, I suspect.

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Heya, this is from the perspective of a student animator that focuses on film, but it's quite a bit of a lengthy process. Also keep in mind I'm coming in from a background in modelling and animating characters on the slightly more abstract side as opposed to realistic. I'll break down the production pipeline below:

Research + Designing:
- One to two weeks of research related to personalities, literature, architecture, etc etc
- Two weeks to a month of designs and iterations (Many many many pages of sketches, you do NOT settle with the first design you like)
- ^ Above includes character: Sketches, pose drawings (LOTS of them - T-poses are also a big no-no if you want to make your character look expressive on paper), environmental concept art, colour palettes
- 3D modelling can take around a month
- Rigging the skeleton for model comes next - this creates a framework for the character's limbs to move
- HOWEVER, you need to 'skin' the character to the skeleton - this means making the geometry of your model's mesh react to the joints in your skeleton. This is done by sort of 'painting' areas of your mesh which you want to move according to the selected joints (it can be a complicated and frustrating affair for some, and others are just plain wizzards at fast and good skinning )
- Next part is texturing which involves UV mapping (sort of like making the seams on clothing to allow you to paint specific areas for textures) and then making the textures themselves (this also includes different layers which can also effect the way the lights shine and reflect on a mesh, or even how the mesh renders in-game itself as well)
- Rigging, skinning and texturing is usually done at the same time by different people, but for one person it can take a a week or two
- Then after that, there's probably 2-3 weeks of just revising and fixing stuff (if you even have time)

Professionals would be quicker, especially since they can have multiple people filling these roles, though the place I study at tries to keep kinda close to a professional schedule (Although with the university itself sort of screwing us over recently, we've had less time to work on our films this year - but that's an OT story )

EDIT: TOTALLY forgot about the animation part. Depending on whether or not you want to match it up with dialogue, and considering you're technically animating just a few lines (and maybe some neutral poses + breathing, etc etc) - it can range wildly based on how good and fast you are. Personally for me, I think I'd take maybe a week minimum.

I've been practicing with various leaderheads I'm working on. I am trying not to get too attatched to anything I make until I know what is absolutely required for the game (What should be the ideal polycount and lods? Can I use multiple models in a leaderscene? How are facial animations going to work?)

I've just been working on trying to match the art style. I can sculpt out a model reasonably quickly but Kerfuffle is right in saying it's a whole long process to make/texture/rig/animate. With any luck, I can recover a significant amount of my pre-release practice.

BarshyJ said:

Assuming Civ VI will allow you to mod in fully animated leaders, how long would that take for someone to create a fully animated leader of the same quality of the ones that we've seen? Just curious to see whether this is actually something that is feasible, which could cure a ton of issues with missing civs leaders etc

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In a nutshell, it's HARD. Not impossible but the way Civ6 looks so far, I'd bet it will be at least as hard as with Civ5 if no tools are made available early on.

It wasn't too terrible in Civ4, and the tools and processes were figured out about mid-way through the game's cycle, so we have a good number of modded leaders. However, there are VERY few custom animations. I'm good enough at Blender that I can whip up original meshes and skin them believably well (although I generally suck at 2D art and textures), but there are very few modders who can create custom animations in a reasonable timeframe (I plan on learning how to make animations this Civ, but most likely only for units).

With Civ5 though, the technique was discovered haltingly, only becoming relatively widely known maybe a year or two ago, way late in the cycle to make it worthwhile. It didn't help that a lot of important graphical utilities weren't included in the Civ5 utilities and we've had to figure out a lot of things on our own. There's also the issue that Civ5 leaders were designed with audio in mind, so there's a lot of body language that just looks odd with no audio unless you want to make the audio yourself (and most people don't have professional grade recording studios and voice acting skills to make it not seem blatantly crappy). It was also harder to match the quality of the in-box leaders, which I guess is a good thing in a way. So basically, there are extremely few animated custom leaders for Civ5 compared to Civ4.

Rhye said:

why not import Civ5 leaders into Civ6?
They were of superior quality anyway. These new ones are quite grotesque

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He lives!