Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to Episode Three of the Civilization V Podcast Series. Today, I am joined by Brian Busatti, Lead Modeler and Environment Artist, and Chris Hickman, Lead Animator, to talk about the art and characters in Civilization V. Because while Civilization may be a game about remaking history and ruling famous empires yourself, you are also pitted against famous personalities from all ages, and doing those likenesses justice was no easy task. The characters are not merely 3D representations of historical figures, but a depiction of these people to fit within the world and character of the entire game, and I wanted to know what the teams process looked like to create these characters.
Brian Busatti: Well first of all we got together as a group of designers and artists and animators and just decided kind of what personality traits were the most important parts for the leaders. And we came up with the ages and kind of their motivations and just basically traits that they would have. Some you might expect, some we decided to choose or change a little bit to adjust because of the game play style.
Chris Hickman: In terms of how we start animating a character, we try to get inside their head kind of, try to figure out what they stand for, what do they want out of life, what motivates them, are they thoughtful, impulsive and from there, that guides us in how we figure how they react to different situations. We tried to make sure that out of all the leaders in the game, no two personalities are alike at all. You get a different experience with each leader that you play with.
ET: As I said before, leaders span all the ages you can haggle with Caesar and Gandhi in the same game. Choosing the empires to appear in Civilization is no easy task, and picking the perfect figure to represent that empire is perhaps even more difficult. Being able to meld those people together into a coherent story? Well, thats the challenge Brian and Chris struggle with every day.
BB: Well I mean you can't avoid the different time periods. We just try to keep a consistent style in our artwork. For example, a lot of the leaders, we went with an idealized form and we didn't wanna make Gandhi like in the past we've had characters like Gandhi look kinda weak. He's almost like a cartoon character; we exaggerate a lot of his proportions. In this example we really wanted to make him look more idealized and look more powerful. Some of that stuff came from references we found we found this one really cool-looking statue of him that just showed a lot of power in him. It still represented Gandhi but we felt that was a really good basis for the model. And uh getting back to like the difference between Washington and Caesar the main thing was we wanted the personality to come through, and we wanted the environments to play a bigger part. So you're visiting their world, you're not necessarily looking for somebody that's in the same time period.
CH: Conceptually how it was explained to me was we wanted to place the player in a direct interaction with a character. We didn't want it to feel like it was stock footage that came from the 1930's or this was theatrical stuff that was filmed many years ago. We want it to be a live interaction. What the player does, the leader is reacting to you, so we wanted to make sure that it was a very live-feeling thing. We didn't use theatrical style cameras. We tried to make it a shot sort of from a POV of the player so you just feel like you're there standing with the person.
ET: Chris talks about one of the most obvious changes for leaders in Civilization V: You no longer see them just as a head as in previous iterations of the series, but instead as a full character, standing in a scene that makes sense with their history and adds to the impact of their words and mannerisms, speaking in their native tongues. These settings were considered and polished just as much as the character models. Without one, the other would not be nearly as powerful.
BB: Oh it was really important. If you look at some of the differences between some of the characters like Askia is in a very, like it's a war-torn environment. Smoldering buildings and just destruction everywhere. You realize right away that he's not somebody that's going to be easy to get along with. And then you look at somebody like Gandhi who's much more peaceful. And it kinda goes with their game play style like the AI for the character.
CH: And just kind of in hitting some of those personality things and the differences Gandhi was really an important leader to me. I wanted to make sure he wasn't treated as a caricature. I wanted to be very respectful to who he was and who he stood for. He was animated by Greg Marlow who did a wonderful job. Gandhi is strong in his convictions and his personality, not in his military might. You may be fighting him in the game but his real weapon when interacting with you is kind of making you think are you making moral choices that are correct, instead of, I'm going to come at you with a whole army. So we have leaders that go from the selfless side, like Gandhi, to someone who is much more selfish, like Augustus Caesar, who is just bored with the whole situation. He doesn't care about the player. You're there, he doesn't really look at you. He doesn't really interact with you. The only time he really notices you is if you defeat him and he says, oh you're kind of a worthy opponent after all. And even going further than that and Greg Marlow also animated Caesar. He got to do a very wide range of personalities and did a great job. Askia is kind of on the extreme far end of that. He is very self-righteous. He is a very powerful character and he believes he's doing God's bidding. So whatever he does is right morally. If you defeat him, his thoughts are, you're gonna burn in hell. So it's a huge range there from trying to make people to make better choices to thinking you're damned for what you do.
ET: The difficulties of creating a cohesive look and feel for each character in concept was no small task, and once those concepts were finalized, making them believable and beautiful from a technical standpoint was a new and interesting challenge altogether. In fact, throughout my visit to the studio, Pete Murray, Marketing Associate at Firaxis, kept raving about Montezuma, who they had just finished before I arrived, and how amazing the fire and feathers looked in his final render. These characters have their own specific technology to make them look as realistic and imposing as possible.
BB: Yeah there's actually, we've got a lot more technology behind this than past products. If you start with Civ IV, and you look at the very small window that you could see the leader, basically there's shoulders and some hand movement with a simple background. The next project we did was Civ Revolution and we decided to go with the waist. So they weren't leader heads, it's a tough thing to break. We keep calling them leader heads but then they became leader torsos. But it was a really cool way to get more personality because you're not just seeing the small window, you're actually seeing broad arm movements. But they didn't have backgrounds because we wanted a weather man effect. Civ V we wanted to just go with full character put them in any kind of situation we wanted to. And the backgrounds and environments became just as important as the character themselves.
CH: In animation we've been super impressed with the work that modeling has done on the environments and the characters and they really drive us to have to work even harder on the animation to try to hold that up because they're doing such an idealized fantastic looking set of models and stuff if we slip up on our side it really shows so they've really helped guide us into doing a better job all around.
BB: And there's a lot of back and forth too between modeling and animation. It's really important to make sure that the model is going to animate correctly so we have to communicate all the time. I send stuff to Chris, he checks it out. Sometimes he makes some modifications to them but, you know, there's a lot of teamwork involved in it. We've got a really solid team working on it.
CH: We up ressed the rigs on the characters up. 3D characters are driven by essentially points in space that form bones in a character. I don't know the exact amount because I didn't work here at the time but I think in some of the earlier version of Civilization a character might have 200 bones in them. The base character that we use in this game has 1200 bones. Some of them go to 1800, 2000 bones. Luckily they've done a great job on the engine and I can throw tons of things at it and it still runs it great. We created a custom rig for the faces so that the animators can, in 2d, essentially sculpt the shapes that they need to be able to do the lip sync and the performance and it makes it a lot easier, faster, and a lot more interactive.
BB: We also have some really powerful shaders now. One of the most my favorite things is the subsurface skin scattering. It really makes the skin feel more alive and less plasticky gives them a lot of warmth that you don't see in a regular standard shader. We have a lot of different materials that we can simulate now, we're a pretty powerful system. We can do really convincing cloth velvet. We have a hair tangent shader that works really well to simulate how the highlights change on the hair. That's just some of the shaders we have, and there's different ways we can mix them.
Pete Murray: Just real quick, are there leaders that you particularly like the way they come across in the game?
ET: You just want to talk about Montezuma right now.
PM: I love Montezuma! He's awesome!
ET: Thats Pete, who I talked about just a minute ago. I told you he liked Montezuma.
CH: Actually we can one of the things that's kind of interesting when you're thinking the character is everybody reacts to a situation differently. Catherine, for example, who was animated by Greg Cunningham, is very flirtatious and very much involved with the player. Montezuma is in a theatrical setting and he's actually playing to a large audience and the player is actually just a pawn in the game that he's playing with the large audience around him. So trying to decide how the leader is reacting to the situation he's in is very important to driving the animation.
BB: Montezuma is one of my favorites. The scene and just the character model in general. David Jones is the modeler that worked on him. He did a great job with it. It's kind of sad it's like, oh he'd be so cool to model but I'm really happy with what he did with it. And the animation just comes together really well.
CH: He was animated by Alex Kim and he did a great job on him. And just in terms of sort of some of the accuracy we tried to get along the way, Oda who was really well animated by Dan Perry is the Japanese leader, and my wife is Japanese so she actually came in and sat in for the audio recordings to make sure those were done precisely and then instead of my actually directing that performance I would take play blasts home to my wife and she would tell us if it was reading as the Japanese performance that was relatively accurate. And she would find footage for us to look at, suggesting this is how Oda might have acted. So that was very helpful. Wu, who is the Chinese Empress in the game, was actually animated by a Chinese animator so as much as we can get it correct for the culture that it's from.
ET: Leaders in Civilization V are much like the historical gameplay realistic and immersive, yet distinct enough to allow you to stray from the realities of the past and make the world your own. They are technical and visual marvels feathers and fire, fur and silk and they are more alive than any Civ leaders in the past, complete with their own mannerisms, voices, and languages (even the dead ones.) The team left no stone unturned in creating complete and lifelike characters and beautiful settings to place them in for you to negotiate and collude with, or perhaps threaten and war against. Its all up to you.
This concludes the third episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. Join us next time as I round up the audio team to discuss the sounds of the game.
just can't read the transcript. Thanks for that though!
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. He looks like an arrogant...er...i guess i can't say this here.
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