Creating Compelling Characters: Insights from a Panel of Character Concept Artists

[Music] so we're gonna go ahead and get started and I want to welcome you guys to the panel for creating compelling characters I'm super geeked to have brought some of these artists up here to help talk about what they do and let's see people are still filing in so if if a lot of them start coming down the aisle they've asked that you kind of squeeze in a little bit to make room for everybody else so my name is Justin Tourette I help out as a art department supervisor over at Blizzard and we were really excited to do this panel right because creating compelling characters is a really important part of a lot of game development and there's so many different ways to do it depending on the type of game and the style there's no one perfect optimal way to design characters so what we were able to do is get a lot of talented people up here to talk about the different techniques and styles approaches and philosophies and help share that with you here today so with that what else so also with the evaluation forms please make sure to fill those out at the end be at the end of the session with that email that you get I help out on the GDC advisory board right so for the visual arts track and we're always looking at ways to improve the content for the VA track at GDC so if you like this kind of material if you enjoyed this please let us know if there are ways that you feel we can improve it or how to plus it for next time let us know as well we want to we want to help make the content for the VA track applicable awesome fun and inspiring stuff so what else all right we're gonna get started here and first up we have Richard from how's that working in here me all right my name's Richard Lyons a concept character concept artist at Naughty Dog been there for the last three years working through uncharted 4 and now working on the Lost Legacy and the Last of Us part two I wanted to talk to you guys today about no we can just cut to this shot yeah what's up you guys today about um about showing your characters in context and how that can avoid some pitfalls of stereotypes and relying on cliches and sort of tropes that go into character design so before we concentrate on this I wanted to tell a little story the other day I was tasked with concepting a tough guy a strong intimidating physical character so I went about it the normal way probably most of us here of I've been taught how many hero concept artists at the moment I'm sweet in character artists yeah awesome so essentially for the most part we're taught to present our characters in a lineup it's a flat background you know showing different costume designs as we go so I did my tough-guy as we all do big barrel chess scored square jaw big pose clenched fists and present in my costumes one of the costumes had him wearing glasses and I was showing it to group of people creative directors designers and a bunch of other people the reaction to the glasses was interesting to me when they saw that they said no no no he can't be wearing glasses that's not indicative of a tough guy and instantly alarm bells are ringing for me that I'm not showing these people enough they're not seeing enough for the puzzle for them to make a decision about what this characters gonna be and what they're gonna wear and how we're gonna present them they're basically trying to tell the whole story at a glance based on shape language and everything else which is great for a lot of games you know Team Fortress 2 at a glance the big heavy guy moves slow hits hard but when you're working on games like Uncharted for The Last of Us where the intentions of the character are totally ambiguous or we don't even want to that character to be reading that way at this point that we want them to read another way at another point all of these kind of clichés and stereotypes sort of fall apart so today I'm going to show a new process that I've been using it's still a work in progress but I'm getting some good results including that character now wears glasses the first thing is our games a realistic character narrative driven games so the first thing I do is I sit down like plot out my narrative so at the moment we're gonna use the storyline of Stephen King's carry spoilers if you haven't seen Carrie I'm about to spoil a story for you it's about a telekinetic magic powered girl high school girl she goes to school she's ostracized she's bullied and eventually she's pushed too far and she murders all her peers with her telekinetic powers so this is what I do is I basically plot out my plot line and you can see these little storyboards over here the first one she started in your school she's optimistic she's happy she's picked on a little bit she starts to be intimidated and starts to be scared she's ostracized by appear so she's alone she's then physically assaulted and in Carrie there's the famous blood pouring on the head I just had her and this one getting beat up and then she unleashes her revenge and is empowered and murders it on their telekinetic powers so this is the first thing I do and I create a gather reference and create a little lineup based on that so we're looking at a whole bunch of reference here and already we can see pitfalls that we probably want to avoid this some really great characters in Ralph Macchio for the out and some other complex characters there's Carrie over there in the top left and then you've got some pretty corny ones that aren't funny until we've had 20 beers like The Revenge of the Nerds and some other ones like that Breakfast Club at this point you can already see that there's gonna be things that people can respond to instantly and if you wanted to take the cheap way out sure you could dress them like Revenge of the Nerds everyone knows that person is going to be ostracized according to some shape language invented in the A's so I create a little line up at this point going from one side to the other trying to keep it fairly natural but there's a few characters in there that you feel in the right circumstances Martha ostracize I've chosen this character because she's cute she's small she's not physically empowered and hopefully because she is cute you're gonna feel some kind of protective instinct to her so the next thing I do is I choose one of my plot points because this is going to be our costume these are thematical beats throughout the rather game for us it's very cinematic so I'm always pitching it like a film what is this person gonna be wearing an h-scene starts to matter oh there's one missing here so I'm chosen a character at this point so let's look at these ones and which you will choose a few of these things and we start slotting in our characters and we could see already that less and less has to be there's less and less pressure on what the character is wearing in isolation because we can already see from this scene that she's pressured by the way she's framed the bully is filling the majority of the frame she squeezed over to one side we see expression we see lighting so the creative director and art directors when they look at these shots are able to understand a little bit more about the character and they don't have to rely on so many tropes so as we go through the shot you realize hey you know maybe some of these character types are a little bit heavy-handed so for me I chose this one here I thought she was natural she still looks she still looks scared our framing technique is made sure she looks pressured okay with her a chest hired so as an audience we understand that we're with her in this experience and at this point you can already see that someone has to make a decision about a costume looking at these has a little bit more information so all of a sudden these are less impactful this is just more like okay this is the blueprint this might even be the first step at a character sheet these are what the creative directors are going to look at so we can even just like swap the character at all together it doesn't have to be a small cute girl anymore it can just be this dude this Ralph Macchio looking dude and still he looks pressure he looks bullied all of a sudden stereotypes are completely gone so from there if we go back and we look at our whole lineup I'd go through each scene and I start blocking shots off so if we look at these was like she starts a new day at school you know it's a pretty standard framing she looks nice she's having a good time the cameras a little bit low she's slightly empowered perfect next shot she's getting bullied just went through that one next shot she's ostracized I mean this is super simple things I mean there's no movement background in this one for a lot of them just grabbing a photo and blurring in the background but for this one it tells a lot you know there's a composition in which he feels ostracized and we've got other things coming through different costume designs as well she's got a hands in her pockets in this one and for although for their technical rigors and things out there the scarf and the hair and the hands in the pockets is gonna be an immediate red flag a light night you know we have this one where she's finally physically assaulted and she's terrified framing again and then with the last one where she unleashes her power and gets a revenge on these bullies and already we can see we've got multiple different frames multiple different attitudes multiple different things coming through this one costume so if we just break these down a quick little breakdown for him so starts a new school but hopeful nervous excited so we've got center frame medium shot she's just off-center with a chest height camera this is a pretty standard shot I've got a little indication that she's too welcome to someone with a little out-of-focus thing in the bottom left-hand side the next shot we went through this one she's bullied she's trapped she's worried we can see here I've trapped her in the right-hand side of the frame the bully taking up most of the shot chest hi camera again as an audience we're with her in this one ostracized by the peers she's lonely withdrawn we've got a contrasting space and with rocking out the NPC's and we're pulling focus on her again it's a really powerful one like being ostracized in a crowd or lonely in a crowd I think is a really powerful visual for this one here we got scared in pain intimidated pretty obvious again she's pressured into one side of the screen we've got parts of the bully in the foreground actually crossing into her face which is also very powerful and we've pulled the camera in a lot tighter so this is a lot more intense and as a dog Ian's we're with her at this point these are all fairly obvious things were four people that are involved in cinematography but I think for me this is the type of stuff that over the last couple of years I've become fascinated with because it's empowered me to present my characters in a different way as opposed to just that lineup and what the last one of course she's empowered possessed focused so we've got a center frame she feels the frame cameras looking up at her so we're basically seeing the view of the the victims that she's now terrorizing it's a really powerful and super easy technique this is actually the same kind of framing for my character with the glasses that I put him in it was sent to frame he was even like popping out the top of the frame yet his hands crossed and he's looking down across these glasses and it's instantly everyone fell in love with it when earlier in the day everyone was telling me it's not gonna fly so it's an interesting contrast there and how you presented ya just swept him to the oyster I mean he said this is the same character and if we look at the lineup you know you're not getting this information so I think these two is probably the two most contrasting the other little thing that comes up and I saw the hands go out but we got technical artists here technical riggers or anything yeah you guys are worth you money so instantly there's a whole bunch of flags that go up we're looking at a costume we've got her in a backpack at the start okay so that's one actor she's wearing the scarf the jacket the next shot we've got her hands in her pockets same simple it's probably not especially if you wanted to have it in real time she's got a scarf she's now using it almost like a turtleneck her heads being brought into it over here how is that gonna interact with the actual scarf really nice fanatical thing with the scarf actually going through next one blood tears how is your team gonna present that how does your FX team has a character team gonna work out how that's done and the last one probably is gonna be the more difficult one is their scarfs gonna unwrap flap around in the air her hair's gonna fly around the place and then she has two flaps for a jacket flying around as well so all of these are probably gonna be different models different actors whatever terminology used in your studio and trying to work that stuff out is a lot of work for a lot of people so already we're hitting on so many points and all we're trying to do is present a costume minority there's a whole bunch of information in there these are really quick sketches that I did I took photos of my wife for the for the most part and just sketched right over the top I dressed her up and what I wanted and I sketched her over the top so you know I can bang out maybe a couple of these in the night and they're just so powerful with presenting a character so I highly recommend using the cinematic presentation so in closing I can ramble about this for hours if you want plot your story beats know your narrative gather up your reference and create the lineup do not present your characters in a lineup you're forcing people to make decisions on one piece of the puzzle and it can lead to some some pretty shonky character design later on present your character in a cinematic fashion it's already here this is really interesting as well you've got the line up to the cinematic I mean you can see the level of emotion that's in one is just totally absent than the other and that's all that's my little tip for you that was awesome very cool different way to think about concept in characters for me so up next we have Claire Hummel from camposanto you guys are in for a treat hi guys my name is Claire Hummel as he just said I've spent the better part of the past decade working in video games I was at Xbox for six ish years worked on fable legends since that overdrive took a side gig doing stuff for bioshock infinite end up at HBO for two years working on West rolled VR which was super fun and now I'm at Campo Santo doing a lot of very cool very secret things that I cannot talk about but they'll be great totally as good as fire watch I promise so what I wanted to talk about is visual narrative through character and costume design specifically kind of focusing on costume design because it is something that I love you can really use visuals to display narrative to display storytelling and you can effectively communicate things like personality social standing culture career etc functionality with the game obviously it's especially interesting to see how thoughtful thorough research into those areas can really steer you away from character design tropes that are prevalent games just like Richard was talking about and helps you kind of end up with something really unique and ownable which is very important in this kind of thing so of course when you're starting to design characters it's very important to determine your setting in the universe that you're within this kind of goes without saying and sometimes you don't really have control over it if you have an art director if you have a showrunner things like that but it's worth thinking about and really internalizing this information as you're going forward with designing your characters they don't exist in a vacuum understanding and establishing this grander context kind of gives you just a way to bounce your character off of various parameters in a really interesting way so there are a million different ways that you can categorize this but here are a couple of spectrums so things like time period and setting obviously make sense if it's a historical setting near future sci-fi what-have-you realistic versus stylized which kind of explains itself literal versus symbolic where you either have literal very realistic ripped from the headlines kind of character designs like we wear today or if you have very symbolic costume designs like what you might see in fury road or Fifth Element things like that and of course playful versus serious there are a lot of games that are stylized but serious or playful but realistic that sort of thing so time period in setting I'm definitely biased towards historical settings it's something I just get a kick out of so that's where my particular expertise lies it was an interesting challenge working for Westworld VR because you aren't designing the literal Old West you aren't designing actual clothing from the 1800s you're designing a kind of fantastical near future theme park version of it so kind of stylized symbolic character designs become really important in a way that they might not be if you're designing actual cowboys from 1860 in Nevada so there are a lot of character designs in West's role the show and that we were playing around with in Westworld VR that I would normally despise but because they're supposed to look trophy because they're supposed to look like they're out of old westerns that become really important you have Hector eschaton the upper right hand corner there who has this horrid leather jacket and stamped leather hat and it's so over the top but he's meant to be this over-the-top villain who has secret depths and so it makes sense for his character in that context realistic versus stylized again I draw a lot of western stuff apparently for work and play this is West world VR on the left of course and then some designs that I did while I was at Xbox for gunpowder and so just showing how you can still use the same imagery but really push it in different directions depending on the final game that you are making literal versus symbolic this is not my art but it seems very relevant I love the character designs in journey they are so simple but so effective and I like how this shows relatively quote-unquote low poly simple deceptively simple character designs but some of them are very symbolic there's no one-to-one parallel with things that exist in the real world like with journey and then if you're looking at the overland character designs down below much more realistic much more relatable and literal clothing that people might actually wear in real life some more examples of literal versus symbolic the right is for Ryse son of Rome or we're allowed to go completely over the top with symbolism of the Gods costume drapery everything the stuff on the left is for a Power Star golf so it's a chick playing golf she's gonna look pretty pretty normal thank you this is another one this is for a project that never saw the light of day that's okay this was a really fun project because it was about fallen angels so we could just go nuts with the symbolic imagery that would not make sense in a realistic narrative so you get to make a crazy fallen angel covered in crying screaming people motifs in the armor which was really fun of course playful versus serious I kind of loved working at Xbox because it meant because of the team I was on I was working on a ton of different properties I think by the time I left I touched 60 different games most of which died but it was still great experience it was very compelling and so a lot of them some of my favorite stuff to work on was sunset overdrive in fable legends so sunset overdrive was like designing the apocalypse in Spencer's gifts which was really fun to play around with and fable of course has this really it's an established property with a very defined aesthetic the shape language of the costumes the visual wit that's really represented in the storytelling in the dialogue the trophy nests of the characters it's very like classic British fantasy it was super fun to play around with and then if anyone listens to The Adventure Zone that's a drawing of Magnus on the Left which is really fun cuz it's just a D&D podcast where a bunch of brothers are around and so you're allowed to give them camo cargo shorts with scale mail underneath them because that makes perfect sense and then serious some designs for abduction on the left another unannounced project in the middle and then Robert Lou Tess for a BioShock Infinite equally fun to play around with and good character designs can kind of exist on any number of these spectrums but having a gritty realistic serious modern-day character doesn't guarantee it's going to be good or bad it's really important to just keep these in mind because you want your characters to plausibly exist within the context of this grander universe you are serving the great master that is the story the gameplay the game as a whole so these are sort of my three tenets of character and costume design especially costume design kind of just costume design that's okay so I like to break it down as thinking about character who is wearing the costume function why are they wearing the costume or what's the purpose of the costume an aesthetic what is the key visual statement of the con so here's a Venn diagram oh good you can see it up there I can hardly see it here so function character anesthetic in varying degrees need to work together to create a good compelling costume and character design if you just have character anesthetic you end up with costumes that don't really have any plausible function within the context of the story if it's just character and function but it's visually bland that's just not exciting you get the idea so character who is wearing the costume what's their personality social standing body type etc I think a character's personality as Richard was saying earlier affects a lot about their overall design it's going to affect posture movement animation acting that sort of thing and this is why it becomes immensely important to think about this as you're designing the character and try whenever possible to reflect it in how you stage your characters how you place them on the page how you present them to art directors that sort of thing I'm getting better at it I used to be we're really thinking about how these characters would wear this clothing how fastidious or sloppy they are how comfortable or awkward they might be in a given situation or costume can be a really compelling way to differentiate characters even when they're wearing identical clothing so a character who's comfortable in the uniform versus someone who's aching to take it off for example so here's the same character from fable legends he's supposed to Hulk out at a certain point and it's a neat comparison of the same costume technically on the same guy but on a character with a completely different attitude completely different body tape type and how it really shapes the character and how he comes across and if you can see up his skirt accidentally function is something I really love to think about it's probably my favorite part of costume design and it's very fun to research but this is really why they're wearing this costume it's the cultural societal background within this world and what's the purpose is it uniform is it formal where is it for mucking about etc a function can be broken down into a number of topics but it's generally generally just this why and why are we any of us wearing anything honestly it's important to consider you don't want someone to be in overly formal wear if it doesn't make sense within the gameplay of the game that you're making the one on the left is from fable legends lots of fable Legends work up here and on the right I have some concepts for hosts from West world VR we have the female host costume already designed for the show itself and we had to design male costumes to match and it was really fun to already have the parameters set where it's like oh these are supposed to be hot sexy dudes wearing very low-cut shirts and then just kind of go on from there they serve a very specific purpose this was fun again for another canceled project at Xbox there are a lot of those you can see in the upper right hand corner I have the this kind of hood scarf design and the idea was that this was a kind of worldwide secret society and so coming up with a with an item of clothing that they could all wear in a myriad of different ways to represent the society the guy who designed the one on the right is standing in the back of the room hi Pat hey this is for scalebound which was unfortunately also cancelled getting tired of saying that but it was super fun to play around with the purpose of this costume because the idea is that this guy gets ripped out of modern day sent into this medieval esque fantasy world and so this was coming up with costumes that reflect where he came from but also slow show the slow degradation of his clothing and also as he starts to add on equipment that he's gotten in the medieval era that sort of thing and he has to let his buff dragon arm out so and finally aesthetic what's the key visual statement of costumes this is color blocking shape language visual symbolism that sort of thing I have a redraw that I did of Elizabeth's second costume which I did not design because I think there are ways that you can still maintain the compelling color blocking of costumes while still giving it plausible historical form thoughtful consideration of what her mother would have actually been wearing given the era that sort of thing I feel like I designed Harley Quinn's in my free time just because it's very easy but she's a fantastic example of a character who has really compelling aesthetics really obvious symbolism color blocking you have these the iconography of the Harlequin and the clown motifs the diamonds the red and black party color and so you can take that shift the time periods around so whether it's 14th century or 16th century or Victorian or punk and you can still tell who that character is because of that compelling aesthetic value that kind of bursts through so again just looking at that Venn diagram it's important so in other words do this I think Leia's costumes from the original trilogy are fantastic they are aesthetically compelling they speak to her character and they speak to the situation that she is and the purpose of the clothing whether it's utilitarian whether she is in whether she's actually dealing with politics things like that and don't do this where someone goes to bed with like flimsy strings of pearls on and her hair up and you can't pay attention in the movie cuz it's so bad or alternatively she's having a chill like by the fire dinner date with her with her with her BAE and she decides to wear these weird arm corsets she's count worst so don't do that and of course once you actually have to put stuff in in the game as we're just talking about earlier you're going to have to accept that eventually in gameplay and technical restraints are going to rain on your parade but it's okay because sometimes those parameters give you interesting inspiration give you things to play off of EV en avant whatever her name is from fable legends I had this extremely complicated skirt that was going to be a pain in the butt to ring but we eventually figured out ways where we could swoop them off to the side group it together so it could be a much simpler rig and then with Elizabeth with young Elizabeth we used damage that sort of shows up as the game goes on as a way to communicate progression in the game communicate her as a character breaking down and also kind of demarcating where she is going to have the big transformation where she changes into her second worse outfit I should probably finish this up so I'm not going to talk about ton about research and reference but do it it's really important we can talk about it later and I'll leave you with this great slide of fur yard of mine from high school and now what I draw which looks a lot better because I research and I think about character design so yeah do that thanks guys Thank You Claire that was lovely and very dense 12 minutes that was awesome okay up next after this talk you will not be able to look in the mirror the same way as you do today so I would like to introduce Laurel from Blizzard Entertainment hi everybody my name is Laurel Austin I am a principal artist at Blizzard Entertainment and I'm here to talk about expressive faces for your characters in concept art and illustration at Blizzard primarily I do marketing art for games like hearthstone Starcraft Diablo World of Warcraft and before I came to Blizzard I began my career as a concept artist at Splash Damage where I was the character concept artist on the post-apocalyptic first-person shooter called brink more recently I've done a lot of artwork for blizzards 2.5 D cinematics including the series burdens of shaohao and some art from Lords of war and harbingers these are sort of unusual projects they're kind of short films that are made up of a series of anime of illustrations and to these illustrations our team adds kind of slight animation and parallax not full animation but somewhere between a motion comic and a full 2d animation and I've always loved painting faces but it was on these projects in particular that I really came to understand how a focus on facial expressions can really enhance storytelling in each of these shorts you follow a character through one of the most pivotal moments in their lives and it's important to spend a lot of energy making the characters emotional state really clear a well-chosen expression can put your character into their contexts tell their story and make them seem real and in my career as an artist a well-chosen expression is is what i found to be one of the most powerful tools i found to connect with viewers and I found that this understanding has changed the way that I approach character art in general so now whether I'm doing concept art or illustration I try to imply as much story and character in the faces as possible so today so today I'm going to share with you a way I've found helpful to break down expressions into their constituent parts so that they can be used as an artistic tool most of us are roughly familiar without psychologists breakdown the basic emotions there's some disagreement on the particulars of this but for the purposes of this talk I'm gonna focus on six basic expressions this is happiness sadness anger disgust fear and surprise expressions themselves are constellations of many small facial movements and we should think of these small movements as the building blocks for our characters performances its if we know a lot of this stuff intuitively but in real life it can actually be quite difficult to see all the elements of an expression we're so used to reading each other in reading each other's faces in our daily lives that when we see an expression on another person's face we often just directly perceive the emotion that it means to us and we don't notice all the little elements that make it up consequently it can be hard to visualize exactly what an expression or what an emotion looks like if you ask people what happiness looks like most people would just say a smile but as most artists - no there's a lot more to it than that so bear with me while I take a few minutes to break down the basic expressions and let's look at some of the elements here you have the expected upward movement of the corners of the mouth but what people often don't notice is that when that happens the nostrils kind of get pulled along with it the muscles of the mouth pull aside and pull the pull the nostrils to the side as well and the third thing in a smile is really the the raise of the lower eyelids this is what psychologists call a Duchenne smile and it's the it's the the hallmark of a true and genuine happy smile rather than one that's kind of weird or fake and when we dial up the intensity all the characteristics just get a bit more extreme and you can get new elements added like a raise to the eyebrows or an opening of the mouth with sadness most people know the downward movement of the corners of the mouth but one thing people don't often notice about frowns is that the downward curve is partly created by an upward movement of the middle of the lower lip in addition the center of the eyebrows raises up and slightly contracts sadness is also a particularly good example of how small changes can make a really big difference in how in the impression that the face gives it doesn't take much to change the impact of an expression at all here we barely move the face at all but by adding more attention to mouths and brow and some tears welling up in his eyes it adds a lot more intensity to the expression and one thing the game artists are often called upon to deliver is anger mild anger is relatively simple our guy here looks a bit peeved his lips are pursed his jaw is kind of clenched and thrust forward his eyebrows go down and his nostrils move upwards and if you intensify anger some surprising things start to happen you get the obvious increase in the upper face tension where you get the lines as the different muscles smush against one another but in the lower face I want you to see what happens in the mouth and neck the tension in the neck and the lips are deeply intertwined and are mostly caused by a muscle called the platysma it's actually one of my favorite muscles and it lies as a sheet in your neck that actually can that goes from the from the bottom of your face right over your clavicles when it's right right at the surface under your skin and this is the striated lines that you often see in comic book heroes and you know when they're really straining and like punching each other in comic books and so anytime you get a downward movement of the corners of the mouth this muscle is activated and that's when you see those lines with disgust it's good to think about it as your face trying to escape or expel whatever the disgusting stimulus is you're you get the mouth and the nose squishing upwards the corners of the mouth moving down and you get a squint to the eyes the squint to the eyes can include the eyebrows but it doesn't have to with extreme disgust you getting again get all the features intensifying but you might also get the tongue protruding as though it's trying to spit out something gross with fear you get a widening of the eyes a flare of the nostrils and upward an upward movement to the eyebrows and inwards as well and you get a bit of a downward movement to the corners of the mouth and when you intensify fear all that movement becomes more extreme and you might also get an opening of the mouth and nose in something like a gas or an intake of breath this movement of the nose is actually quite distinct to the one we talked about unhappiness because this one actually indicates a must like the muscles in the nose taking in breath so it's a bit different in surprise the whole face can appear to stretch vertically the brow goes straight up the eyes widen and the mouth can open in this case even though his jaws slightly opened his lips are still together so you kind of you know you kind of get that that's a prize face where your lips are still together and more extreme surprise it the the mouth might open fully and all the elements again become more exaggerated so all this stuff is pretty simple we people see people's faces every day we all know that these little constellations of facial movements can make up these expressions but what happens when we start to combine them and this is where things really start to get interesting we can combine aspects from one expression to aspects of another and this is how we create the most truly interesting and subtle effects so if we add aspects of happiness to aspects of surprise what do we get free puppies here his mouth opens and his corn the corners go up as you as you expect from happiness his eyebrows raised as in surprise and you get the lower lid raised indicating that he is indeed very happy about the puppies and then what happens if we instead of surprise swap out anger you get the mouth position is actually identical here it is exactly the same um but his eyebrows contracting make a face that suit a very different story a story that may or may not have happened to me in high school you can even combine the same two expressions in different ways for different effects and if we dial back the intensity you get adding slight anger to slight happiness you get the ever useful smolder this expression is found on box art a lot and occasionally on actual humans here you get the eyebrows contracting a little bit a bit of the lower lid raised and a slight upturn to the mouth and sometimes we have a very specific story moment we have to work to in this case surprise and fear let's say your kid backing your car into a mailbox near the mouth opening the mouth opens the eyes widen the eyebrows contract as in fear and the eyebrows raise more fears of ours actually have a lot of they are actually quite similar expressions and share a lot of elements you have to identify which which parts are sort of iconic to each particular expression in this case the eyebrow contraction is very important to indicate fear but what if our story changes and we have to add elements of a third expression something like disgust here it might suit a story a bit more like this so again you get you have an unchanged eye movements you have an unchanged eye movement because disgust really doesn't come into the eyes a whole lot but you get the nose wrinkling the corners of the mouth pulling down in the lips protruding but you still have the open mouth like in the like in fear and surprise you can even combine diametrically opposed emotions to really nice effect and it's worth experimenting to see what sorts of impressions you can get by adding one bits of or bits of expressions to one another so how do we improve at making expressive faces keep a mirror around pay close attention to the way your own face looks and as you study the basic expressions and use it to help you try things out Justin can attest that I do have a mirror at my desk for this exact purpose study the anatomy there are dozens of muscles in the face and while you don't need to know all of them knowing the major groups of them will really help you understand what bits affect one another and how that all and how it all comes together mixing and matching bits of basic expressions is a way I found helpful to help me understand more complex expressions what I've shown you here is this the tiniest sliver of what you can do it's almost like paint in the end where you can just take little bits of one and add them to a lot of another and you get like infinite infinite possibilities things like insanity egotism impatience they all just get a bit more flavor if we can throw in things that are unexpected so using this approach to facial expressions has helped me add more layers to my character art and I hope you found it helpful too Thank You Laurel that was awesome very eye-opening very cool and last but definitely not least we have Simon from d-pad studios hello so I'm Simon s Anderson and the art director for a game called al boy and a studio called d-pad studio and it was a pixel platformer with an emphasis on flying mechanics so if you're expecting a 3d talk then unfortunately you're in the wrong place has anyone actually played it here yes there are people exist all right so what I'm going to be talking about is finding that purpose and final touches to your character designs because a lot of times you have kind of what you want but not quite I'm not gonna dictate exactly how you're gonna do this so just think of it as the thing that you can add to your toolbox and then discard all the rest of it okay everyone on board okay so okay long title yeah yeah yeah this is the game I made it's very pretty and these are all the characters that I did they're also very pretty okay so first off what is the purpose of your design so context and purpose are going to be integral to what your design needs to look like so what audience isn't is it made for what is this function within your game how does the design blend with the universe that you've already made and second what do you do when you have when you know the goal of your design but it kind of feels off so most of you are familiar with concepts like strong silhouettes color Theory abstract shapes and main character traits mostly because these guys already told you about it so but sometimes you have those things and your design does and still doesn't quite work so let's start up with design purpose I'll start up with some examples on how perspective can guide your design to become more interesting and I'll do that by bringing up a game that I did not design which would be these ones here we have the Minish Cap we have SE candidates who we have Breath of Fire all of these are top-down games which you look for a specific direction and [Music] they are I have handwritten notes it's great so certain projects will require you to view your game from a certain angle so this is especially true for 2d art and pixel art or sometimes 3d and usually you're stuck with the perspective you choose for the majority of the project so you want to reuse your assets as much as possible and as such the perspective you pick is really important to your character design often these days you make these decision to take these decisions for granted just as how things are but let's look at link for example so if you look at his design there's a lot of emphasis on the hair and the hat because that's what you want to see from a top-down perspective for example if you look at here this is a very different illustration than what you see in the instruction manuals emphasis on the hair very important because that's all you're gonna see you're not gonna see much of the torso so from a character design perspective he might seem fairly plain now this is a character clearly designed for low resolutions when you did not have a lot of memory for your consoles however if you compare the design to the more recent ones you can kind of see how it's changed there's a lot more emphasis on the mid body and what you carry I mean you can see that the keel is carrying on the back and you have that nice big belt going there but it has it does actually serve a purpose it shows that the center of mass is in the center of the character it's not just some sort of casual trait that you do and I would say it's not a surprise that later Zelda games have been using the wind waker design again an emphasis on the hair you still have the hat on it and there's a there's a lot less emphasis on the lower half of the body so all of this is done in sections and I also want to take a footnote take a moment just to consider whether or not you picked certain shapes of your character and as if it was supposed to be that way or because it actually serves a function okay so some rules of thumb for design theory now there's some simple rules on what you can bring attention to again you're probably familiar with practices like outlines and body shapes and all of that so I want to bring attention to two of them repeated color blocks and consistent patterns now finding color blocks is really simple and is good rule of thumb for any design so the gist is that you pick a certain set of colors for your character and make sure they're repeated throughout the design pleasingly I think Street Fighter is a greeting good example of that notice that most of the characters here the current colors are repeated more than once and usually takes up a large space so picking too many colors can feel busy and inconsistent of course it depends on what kind of project you're doing mmm lost my train of thought here if something feels off or you it feels inconsistent do a quick color check to see if any other colors are actually repeated or you're acting weird under color or for that matter if they're too similar you can also break the rules by adding a focus color now your color choices can be nice and spread out but having a single dominant color without repetition can be surprisingly satisfying next we have consistent patterns I think this is the wrong slide actually ah nevermind often you add minor details tawny or our designs and we forget that a particular shape or line is more pleasing if it repeats itself throughout the character if there are a number of defining shapes then you'll start feeling that something is off so I'll be using my own main character as a good example for this so this is Otis he's the main character of my game very nice and why I say nice it is a sketch from roughly ten years ago and he does look terrible he's got some basic ideas here but just to point them out you can see that he has some barely visible eyebrows he has some sort of sideburn kind of thing he has like a checkerboard thing on his neck just plain hands and the only repeatable pattern that I can kind of see is the black around his neck and a little line around his feet so let's jump forward this is his final design now in the final version the differences might appear subtle but I'll point them out so for the shapes there are pointed tips all throughout his design so if you look at the hair the sideburns sideburns the eyebrows and tips of his shoes all of those are points also his neck fluff incidentally mirrors the shape of his shoes now you have consistency I've also employed color blocking as you can see here the shoes and cloak no wait yeah shoes cloak and hair show you the same colors as dude's sweater and eyebrows as well as his sweater edges and neck fluff and his skin and his pants are purposely made to be similar to make his face stand out less so the only element here that is just stands out are his gloves because they are the main element of the game if you played elbow you know that you do a lot of carrying the game so you want to see his gloves at all times but just to make sure that it fits the whole theme of it I've added two little dangly relic things that show up when you run so it doesn't feel too intense however I would make an argument that sometimes when you make these main shapes it's usually difficult to find them when you're doing it in a big resolution especially when you're doing small sprites so often times I will actually design a character in pixel art this was the in-between before I did the finalized design now so this is what then what he looked between looked like between the two and designs by translating the original sketch to pixel art I had to choose the elements which stood out the most so his colour placement his big neck emphasis on the sideburns eyebrows and all that came from the small scale you can kind of see how that moved along so also just a little side thing if if you're looking at your design and you're thinking these these things are nice but I can't quite tell if they're they're fitting the theme of it try to remove them instead take away every single part and see what feels weird then put them back and emphasize all right so next up how to do abstract design principle on realistic characters now let's see here so it's a very common issue that the design of one thing doesn't marry the feel of the style of something else in the world this is also something this is also one of the reasons why pixel art traditionally has been so different so easy to iterate on for example when you rotate a pixel you kind of break the consistency consistency is the most important thing when you're doing character design and when you're trying to make things fit into the world but this also applies to realistic characters so I'm going to use the example of how Marvel translated their characters from movies know from comic books into movies and to show you how they did that so on the surface it's sort of the standard idea that well it kind of grayed them out and gave them more detailed suits and that's why they fit him but I want to make the argument that it's very subtle things drawn in from the world that makes these things fit to use Captain America as an example here you see the movie version one of the things they've done here is that they've incorporated subtle design cues from the military personnel that he's actually hanging out with you can see that on his belts you can see that on his helmet it's still the same character but because it shares those consistent design traits and that's why he fits in if you instead had taken the design from let's say the comic books where he has sort of his fish-scale armor thing there's nothing that draws parallels between the area that he's in and the area that he is supposed to represent and you can practically do this with everything if your movie is looking like a giant neon landscape you want your characters to look like that neon landscape if your characters are a dark and gritty you want them to reflect that so draw in things from the rest of your world and your characters will feel more alive so just a final thought because we don't really have that much time I've rambled a lot about different design principles and maybe not all that made sense but I would urge every one of you to break every single thing that I said because I'm just some guy and I have random opinions and I'm pretty sure that most of you will figure out a lot more interesting ways to design characters than I can hop on stage in ten minutes so thank you for your time awesome thank you guys very much I want to just do one more round of applause for the panelists up here to participate in this I appreciate it very much this is kind of just an experiment to see how we can involve the art talks and the art presentations at GDC so again fill out your your surveys let us know what you think and we'll continue to iterate on this format and I believe we have some time for some questions so there's some mics here on the side if anyone has any questions for any of the panelists go ahead and ask away hi my question is for Richard when you are like designing those like little vignettes or are you just putting one of your favorite designs in them and then presenting them to the rest of your team or then that was for you sorry basically what I was trying to get it maybe I didn't explain it very well but once you've got those scenes set up it's very easy to swap out your costumes okay I mean for the most part you know our casting and our costume comes in two different waves for us at Naughty Dog so costume wise once we know what that person's going to look like ethnicity age you know all kinds of other things we take into account it's mainly just going to be costume at that point so once you've got that scene set up what I like to do is I swap out all my costumes and I test them in that environment so again you have multiple pieces of the puzzle in play there's a narrative in there and you're testing that costume against that so for instance stereotypes and tropes in a lot of cases when I started doing this process instantly it was it was too heavy-handed Jinan I mean you're beating the audience over the head going this guy's a villain or this guy you know so you find out that subtlety is is where you want to be you want to as I think few of us said you want to support the and support the design you don't want to be distracting people from that yeah doesn't answer your question yeah maybe just to clarify it my question was sort of about like getting buy-in from the team you mentioned how they at first they didn't like the glasses on your bruiser character but then they they did was that because you presented all of those with the designs that you wanted i I did so in that presentation that I did I first showed a lineup of characters realized that people were making decisions based on too little information then I set up a scene with this chapters look at all you know empowered by the framing and the setup of the shot and then I repeated all those costumes within that and I was confident that the glasses were gonna sell and I thought that it was a it was a better way of presenting it and they did everyone came back the next day and was like we're thinking though think of the glasses is pretty cool down okay cool that's yeah that make sense thank you as a writer can you guys describe what you would like to see when a writer pitches like I character overviews like some specific elements I can at least speak from the perspective of my current team I'm working with Sean vanaman who's the writer at Campo Santo and when the founders of Campo will often be figuring out characters by writing out these small dialogue vignettes and it has been immensely helpful for me to be able to just more so than just writing down on paper saying like oh they're quirky or they're sassy seeing them in context and interacting with each other gives me so much to play around with and so it already helps me in the same way that by showing them actually in a scene that also gives me something to build off of and it has been immensely helpful so anytime I can actually get dialogue or kind of a vertical slice of what a scene might be like even if it's completely scrapped later in production I found that to be very helpful things I also found that if you are clear about how you want the viewers to feel about the character like if you want them to be vulnerable if you want them to feel powerful or or or anything like that it's it's that's important stuff for visual artists to know hi so for Claire you have like that whole section on reference and you didn't you had to rush through it and I was wondering with a bit more time if you or anybody had more to say about that stuff that seemed cool yeah reference is super important and very important to my process I wholly recommend you're working on a character get your raw ideas unadulterated by reference down on paper start researching start doing studies from that research to really internalize the reference because you start to build up this muscle memory and you build an internal library in your brain to draw from which is way better than just scrolling constantly through your Pinterest pages and then you integrate the reference and then once you get at that point you have to kind of put your foot down and also decide when you break from that reference because it's meant to be guidelines to guide your design in the right direction but again you're making a game you're making it in the context of other characters and story and so being able to decide what you're drawing from how you're going to integrate it is super important if you like artists look at the artists they are looking at instead of looking at their work yeah thank you I'm gonna add something that does well that with the reference gathering then did I do I often find it really helpful to involve the rest of the character team as well especially if you know which model is gonna work out or which a domain is gonna work on it get them involved really early there's a is a there's a part of the character production in games which seems to separate those groups and some you know people get turned into this 3d machines and other people are so left with probably too much responsibility and not enough enough people chiming in so I think it's really good when you're collecting that reference I go and chat to the character modeler as well get them collecting reference as well so that they're invested they got IDs in there also all right so a quick question on the decision-making process that you guys do when you go through the girl with the glasses at what point do you think it's safe to expose your concept art and the entire story to outside of the art department essentially and how do you prevent randomization from like business people who are maybe not so great at looking at the full story and saying okay we get it I think I think the I mean once you've got those scenes set up I think it's safe to start at least at the moment nothing's ever going to be perfect it's a really organic process no game is ever the same to work on you're always going to get look at least at Naughty Dog it's very flat so you're gonna get a lot of opinions from different departments and you've got to be flexible on that and you've got to realize that your ideas not always gonna be the best and even you know it might not be your taste that we're going for so my advice would be to put your best you know foot forward but always be flexible when that when those opinions come in it's a tough thing I think is concept artists especially if you're sitting near a hallway as I do a walkway so you're constantly having people like oh yeah the tenth time today you like shout about it again it's it's it's it's tough but it's I think you have to be flexible and remember that it's it's not your baby it's it's a big group of super talented people and the best thing you can do is you know make sure that they're excited about something so yeah I would say take the time and stay flexible and and don't sit in the corner and do it in isolation thank you so I'm curious you talked a bit about the idea of pushing away from some of the tropes archetype stereotypes I'm wondering how you guys strike the balance between sort of familiar easily understandable clear concepts and more nuanced characters with depth how do you guys walk that line team effort I imagine terrific I can say Ferb from our point of view we look a lot at film costuming and film we like to keep it you know it's still fairly heavy-handed would uncharted The Last of Us is a little bit more subtle but I mean we have such amazing animators and acting and script and everything going on there was so many other things in play that educate the audience including the framing and stuff that I was talking about as to to how we go about presenting that that I mean subtle for me at the moment is always the best plan I mean I would say that the majority of characters I'm touring at the moment I'd like t-shirt and jeans you know what I mean like I just sit around with a lot of photos and you know sketch them up and like that's another dude and t-shirt and jeans keep it real subtle that that person's gonna behave in a certain way the tough guy one is a really interesting narrative we were talking about it over lunch you know Joe Pesci is one of my favorite tough guys if I did him in a lineup with tough guys no one's gonna pick him but when you're in that scene and there's that you know tension and he's scaring the hell out of everyone then you know then that comes across so I don't know to answer your question though matically there's some really nice things you can play to in a game as subtle as The Last of Us but my intention is always to support everything else that's going on and not to distract from it I think it really depends on the on the narrative of the game as well or in the narrative of anything you're doing and and the needs of that narrative and how viewers are supposed to feel about that narrative while they're experiencing it and you sort of felt like if you have to took concept it like a nerdy character you're like well nerds have glasses so I'll put them in glasses and and and that's sort of like it's obvious it may be the right thing to do but it's not so much that you have to like do like totally be like no nerds can't have glasses cuz they always have glasses no like it's not it it's more like do whatever do what you're doing but do it with with intention like say the character head the audience has to feel this way so my choices are going towards that so it's like if I want a character to again feel vulnerable make them physically small if you want them to to blend in maybe they have they don't contain any bright colors maybe all the values are sort of close together and so when they're put into their context they they sort of blend in a little bit more so it's thinking about all of those things and and making a character whatever style it's in to be unique and and whatever it needs to be for its context I was just gonna say that I love looking at dogs as good inspiration for character design in terms of you can have really shitty little dogs and really sweet little dogs and the physicality of them is not really does not really defines who they are as a character and it's great to think of character designs that same way it's like the acting and animation which again is why you involve those teams can bring so much to those characters and can actually play against the expectations that the audience has in really interesting ways so [Laughter] does that answer your question absolutely I was just standing here to encourage the responses thank you for that it'd be a blast from the whole panel if you'd like to share some thoughts as well not saying you did the whole time frame is this thing on okay you know one of the things that I've experimented a lot with is basing character design on shape so all of my characters were the main characters that I usually do are based on some sort of base shape and then I tried to squish them and see what that makes them do so I have one character that I like in particular called Alphonse I designed him to be a pair that's what he was and part of his personality came from just trying to see him run because you know he was a big guy but it was it was interesting because I started thinking about how does the do the mechanics work because he had like a large bulbous well bottom and let's just say that but I started thinking about it and I realized that this doesn't make sense and not for his Anatomy why is that and eventually it hit me that he's a robot and because he's a robot that implies a lot of the way he acts and the way he does things and I ended up doing that with all the characters and they I had a main character whose face was just kind of a big oval and to kind of even that out I gave him a big hat but because it gave him the Hat it gave him a lot of expressive traits one of the reasons why he ended up being really shallow and shy and kind of cowardly was because he had to interact with his hat what do you do with it well you pull it down over your head it's I feel like shape and just squishing them and using them and throwing them around that's a way to get to know your character I think that's about all I got thank you hi this is a question for Richard so your work is a lot of really beautiful line work with like a solid color underneath I'm just wondering from like more of a technical execution standpoint like how do you tackle designs that ask for like unique texture or is that something that I ever encountered during your work and that you have to like show texture in a flat color or a line line work without sort of painting is that something that you do or do you have ways to get around I I think that the line work and the way I'm approaching art at the moment is interesting for me just as an artist so I started doing it over the last couple of years also unfortunate enough at our studio that our creative directors a big comic fans Neil druckmann is a massive comic nerds so he loves seeing that stuff and he's able to read it really well we're also working on projects where things are in known quantity you know jeans sneakers you know I don't know how many dudes I drew with machine guns but you know they get it it's an army boot that's army pants so once again I'm collecting reference and I'm talking to those character models so everyone's on the same page by the time I spit out those lineups of concepts everyone understands what they're looking at because we've sat around and we've talked about what kind of materials we can execute on you check the technical rigors about secondary motion for your army guys and you know your material artists about you know the difference between a fatigue you know hang grenade or whatever else is gonna be there so I'm very lucky in that regard that we have that open conversation there are other characters where you know you have to paint the bejesus out of it your photo bashing hell out of it for those that played uncharted 4 there's a couple of characters that worked on that a you know executed to a borderline photo rendering state the old adventurer who passes away in the match spoilers there's an old adventurer so for that one you had to take a different tack so that's very much photo bashed does that answer your question yeah so like you kind of take a different way to approach it instead of the lineart if you need an extra work yeah I think I think I've it made sense to me because I'm already trying to be incredibly social on the floor and with the rest of the character Department right and I find that things go a lot more smoothly by being that way and then all of a sudden it didn't make sense to be rendering the hell out of everything so I mean everyone that needs to know just sat down and looked at the reference and now I'm photo bashing at reference back into some you know it didn't make any sense so what's left to decide shape language the waiting of the character where these helmets have got to be so for me I sort of fell into this line on a comic book type stuff and plus it's really fun and it's super quick you can just you know you can bash him out really fast all right thank you I do think that's a super important point about concept art though is that it's not about making finished illustrations it's very tempting to finish these things and polish them because it's all about your art you're part of this larger pipeline and so you need to communicate just enough to whoever's next in that pipeline and yeah I've often found that when I was younger in the industry I just painstakingly render these things because I wanted the accolades of having beautifully painted a thing but I could have just as easily done line art flats and then call out textures and it would have communicated it just as well possibly better so being a concept artist I know you go to art go to art station and start looking through portfolios where everything's just polished to a tee but sometimes it's a bunch of polish on a bad design I'd rather see an unfinished good design that communicates well rather than something that's been painted for a week on end useless that is that is the most important thing I think anyone has said today it's really confusing for concept artists you look at CG talk you look at art station you see all this marvelous art it's it's not about that it's about making a game so you know I'm sorry I can't emphasize that's here that's very good right you're making a video again we're not making an art exhibition thank you hi this is Christine for Laura when you mention you just combine some features of face of different emotions like emotions like like like like a surprise or sorrow you combine them like this randomly or there's a rule behind there there's definitely thought on on which ones like which aspects of which one you might combine and that really comes down to sort of performance and your own feeling about what it ought to be that's why I say keep a mirror around so if you're thinking like okay I have this I have the situation that I want to make an expression for and I and what face does my character make and so you can kind of test it out in the in the mirror and once you kind of have something there you can think okay maybe this this character feels like it feels derisive compared to the person he's talking to he's looking down at them so maybe he's kind of sneering with a little bit of disgust so you're adding like a bit of a you're adding a bit of a lip curl to that to that face so it's really it's it's an artistic tool it's not like a plus B equal C it's it's it's just it's a way to sort of break it down and and think about what you're doing yeah that's about just like try to be actor basically yeah it's basically it's what animators do it is just just what they do and they've known this for a lot of time for a long time so this would be not very new to them but for 2d artists I found it was new to me anyway okay thank you my questions for Simon you had a very long development process of most ten years so I was wondering how often you have to reiterate your main characters or any of your characters in terms of design and how important it was for bringing other artists to look at your work yeah it was um it was nine months no nine years minus one month so it was it was quite some time the the main character actually was a point of contention because it was it was literally one of the first things I made for the project and after working on it for maybe five years and realizing that it's not really all that good you can't just trade out about 200 animations so what we did instead was that we compensated by making the animations more fluid and giving more emphasis on what you did so we did a talk yesterday where we showed the difference between the running animations on the beginning and afterwards showing how you did turn cycles and you added emphasis to movement when you flow and that sort of thing in terms of the game itself the good thing about the game was that we didn't do the game with tile sets we did it with assets so it was big pixel chunks that you could put anywhere and incidentally that also means that they're fairly easy to replace we did very big pieces and mostly the the really old stuff was in the very middle of the game so when you're flying through through that part the quality is kind of there the the tutorial levels were sort of late development and in the very last stages I think I did something like a 3,000 pixel scroll just to show that I could do something proper for once so I feel like that was a that was a good way to compensate I'm sure the sprite is fairly old but animation is always appreciated so that was how we solved that thank you like to thank the panel for a wonderful presentation and if there are any further audience questions the breakout room across the hall is available [Applause] you

Channel: GDC

Views: 70,888

Rating: 4.9466863 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, character design, game art

Id: lA5HG8Q4sKg

Length: 76min 34sec (4594 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019