hugojackson18
Warlord
I've been working in the vfx industry for 5 years and we do a lot of character work. I also have some knowledge in Game workflow, but this is not my priority speciality (although I'm working as much as I can to develop this side of my portfolio on my down time). I have applied to work at Firaxis this year as character and envionment artist but got rejected, as I haven't worked in the game industry before and I am sure they are a LOT of more suited candidate for the job, which is fair enough.
And even if you could make a leader in a lot less time than I'm going to describe here, the leaders in the game are spectacular, and this would realistically be the amount of time they took to make them.
So let's start with the design process after choosing the leader. This can take WEEKS of design, retakes and changes. To end up on something like they have, I reckon it took at least a month in design from start to finish for each leader. Just for the design part (drawing the character, his expressions, his looks etc). These leaders have really strong designs, and this doesn't come with the first drawing. Obviously you could start on a crappy design or first design, which could take maybe a few days for a very good character designer, but in a studio like this, there are feedbacks, retakes etc. Having such caricatural characters take time to design as well. You have to adapt paintings or representation of the leader in a new style, and this can make for loads of iterations.
Then comes the modeling. You can assume that with good drawings sheet, an experience character artist could finish the modeling in 2 or 3 days, but let's say a week. You have to sculpt it (in zbrush) that could take 2-3 days alone, then do the re-topology of the sculpt (in Maya or 3dsmax) to fit the poly-count required for the engine, and this can take 2-3 days too. So one week for modeling.
Then you've got to rig it. This is basically putting a skeleton in the character so you can animate it. Assuming you have an auto-rig, and most companies do, you can spend 2 days to rig a character. They usually give the rig to the animator to test how it reacts with the model, and have to do a few retakes. So let's say 4-5 days total to finish the rig. This can get really tricky when you've got characters like Gilgamesh with huge muscles, where interpenatration will definitely be a problem, as well as muscle deformations.
Then animation... Now this can take awhile. Especially when you see the quality of the animation of some leaders. I'd say one or 2 weeks for each section of the leader (welcome, idle, idle angry, idle friendly, going to war, defeated). The welcome animation on Cleopatra for example is STUNNING. I assume this would have take 2 weeks alone. So let's say 3-4 weeks animation per leader.
Now while these last two phases are going on, you have to "look dev" the character, make it look good, including all the textures and shaders. Now I know that the guys at Firaxis used a tool called Quixel Suite (which you can see in action here and here) to texture their characters. This is a plugin for Photoshop that makes creating textures and materials much easier and faster. This gives multiple textures to use in the engine, like Diffuse, Specular, Glossiness and Normals, all at the same time, in a PBR way (phisically based rendering) to have materials react like they would in real life. This is really obvious on the leaders this time around and is a major step-up from Civ 5! I assume with this tool, they could knock out a whole character's look dev in a few days, but let's say a week again to make it perfect. It also means we'll be able to use the same tools to make great looking leaders, assuming you have the skills.
Finally, you have to light the leader scene in the engine. This can take half a day if you've got a set up you are reusing for most leaders.
So to recap of the time I assume Firaxis would have spent on each leader, with obviously amazing artists at each of these tasks that gives us:
Assuming you are not a pro and don't aim for the quality they have (but why would you do that...), and don't have to design the character, you could potentially have these kind of timings (assuming you'd still want to have something of quality and on par with the game's leaders):
I hope this helps!
And even if you could make a leader in a lot less time than I'm going to describe here, the leaders in the game are spectacular, and this would realistically be the amount of time they took to make them.
So let's start with the design process after choosing the leader. This can take WEEKS of design, retakes and changes. To end up on something like they have, I reckon it took at least a month in design from start to finish for each leader. Just for the design part (drawing the character, his expressions, his looks etc). These leaders have really strong designs, and this doesn't come with the first drawing. Obviously you could start on a crappy design or first design, which could take maybe a few days for a very good character designer, but in a studio like this, there are feedbacks, retakes etc. Having such caricatural characters take time to design as well. You have to adapt paintings or representation of the leader in a new style, and this can make for loads of iterations.
Then comes the modeling. You can assume that with good drawings sheet, an experience character artist could finish the modeling in 2 or 3 days, but let's say a week. You have to sculpt it (in zbrush) that could take 2-3 days alone, then do the re-topology of the sculpt (in Maya or 3dsmax) to fit the poly-count required for the engine, and this can take 2-3 days too. So one week for modeling.
Then you've got to rig it. This is basically putting a skeleton in the character so you can animate it. Assuming you have an auto-rig, and most companies do, you can spend 2 days to rig a character. They usually give the rig to the animator to test how it reacts with the model, and have to do a few retakes. So let's say 4-5 days total to finish the rig. This can get really tricky when you've got characters like Gilgamesh with huge muscles, where interpenatration will definitely be a problem, as well as muscle deformations.
Then animation... Now this can take awhile. Especially when you see the quality of the animation of some leaders. I'd say one or 2 weeks for each section of the leader (welcome, idle, idle angry, idle friendly, going to war, defeated). The welcome animation on Cleopatra for example is STUNNING. I assume this would have take 2 weeks alone. So let's say 3-4 weeks animation per leader.
Now while these last two phases are going on, you have to "look dev" the character, make it look good, including all the textures and shaders. Now I know that the guys at Firaxis used a tool called Quixel Suite (which you can see in action here and here) to texture their characters. This is a plugin for Photoshop that makes creating textures and materials much easier and faster. This gives multiple textures to use in the engine, like Diffuse, Specular, Glossiness and Normals, all at the same time, in a PBR way (phisically based rendering) to have materials react like they would in real life. This is really obvious on the leaders this time around and is a major step-up from Civ 5! I assume with this tool, they could knock out a whole character's look dev in a few days, but let's say a week again to make it perfect. It also means we'll be able to use the same tools to make great looking leaders, assuming you have the skills.
Finally, you have to light the leader scene in the engine. This can take half a day if you've got a set up you are reusing for most leaders.
So to recap of the time I assume Firaxis would have spent on each leader, with obviously amazing artists at each of these tasks that gives us:
- Design = 2 weeks
- Modeling = 3 to 6 days
- Rigging = 3 to 5 days
- Animation = 3 to 4 weeks
- Look Development = 3 to 5 days
- Lighting = half a day
Assuming you are not a pro and don't aim for the quality they have (but why would you do that...), and don't have to design the character, you could potentially have these kind of timings (assuming you'd still want to have something of quality and on par with the game's leaders):
- Design = 1 day (assuming someone else do the design, or you take a design from the internet)
- Modeling = 2-3 days sculpting, 2 days retopo = 5 days
- Rigging = 1 day using an auto rig and not caring about skinning too much
- Animation = 3 weeks to do maybe one "welcome", one idle, one "going to war" and one "defeat"
- Look dev = 3 days
- Lighting = half a day (texting and re-using the lighting from one of the existing leaderscenes)
I hope this helps!
(Peckham)
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