Services provided
3D Character Creation and Rigging- Motion Capture Recordings
- Character Animation
Tasks in numbers
- 18 characters (complete cast of the game)
- 400 character animations
House of Tales Entertainment has already worked with us on their innovative adventure game “Overclocked” in 2006, so two years later we were happy to provide characters and animations for their new title “15 Days”, too.
After we received the storyline and the vita of every single character that would appear in the game, we started to develop the look of each person. Every character had to have a unique appearance according to his background. The player should be able to recognize the nature and behavior of each human that would appear in the game only through his visual appearance.
We suggested designs for their faces, hairstyles, clothing and accessories to discuss these with our client. After the look was accepted, we started modeling and texturing each character. The graphics of 15 Days gain a lot of their special look though an interesting lighting atmosphere. Therefore the creation of normal bump maps for the characters was giving them a very vivid and interesting look, combined with the game’s lighting engine.
After completion of the meshes and textures we rigged the characters to a standardized bone skeleton for the next step in development: the animation. Several motion capture recording sessions were scheduled. Especially for the initial sessions it was very helpful to have Martin Ganteföhr, the creative director at House of Tales, attending them. It was good to combine his vision of the game and the characters with our knowledge regarding the technical aspects of the movements.
As the characters needed to be able to speak and display facial expressions in this adventure game, we have created a bone rig consisting of 28 face bones and set up all the necessary phonemes for lip-sync speech as well as expressions that displayed different moods. These phonemes and expressions were used with the “Emotion FX Middleware” from Mystic Game Development to control the facial animation for the characters with the help of recorded speech.
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