Making of Varga

“Making of Varga ” by Paul Tosca
beauty shot :winning pose :2.Game modeling workflowsNowadays almost all games are using normal maps for ingame characters ,even mmos , so a high poly version of the character will most likely be needed to bake the normals for the low version. The normal maps can be done without the help of a high rez version of the model , from bump maps , even painted directly by hand ( i will show you some tricks i use to paint normal maps directly in photoshop later on ) though its less likely that you can achieve the same results as a high poly version will do. The assets required for the creation of a character will most likely be:

low poly version ( or multiple versions for different LODs)
high rez poly version used to compute normals for the low poly one ( you could also bake occlusion maps and other maps that will help you later when texturing …see paragraph “4.3.Transfer maps” for this )
all kind of textures that the game engine will support ( diffuse, normal , specular are the most used ones)I suppose that a concept/drawing is available and the steps that will follow are modeling/texturing. There are mainly two approaches you can take when modeling ( the difference between them being the order in which the assets are created )

low poly model -> diffuse texture -> high poly model-> normal map and other textures
high poly model-> low poly model -> normal map -> diffuse and other textures Both ways can give good results if done properly and the choice will mainly depend on the pipe-line already established; i used to work both ways in the past but i prefer the last approach. Though the low/diffuse/high workflow might have some advantages ( like the low poly version of the characters will be ready to go down the pipeline to animators earlier in the process ,or the creation of the highrez version will be quicker if you work carefully and keep lots of selections into the diffuse psd file than you can later on apply as displacemets on the high rez mesh) it has one big disadvantage and i will picture it in a quick example. Let us say that below is a piece from a model (a shirt with some buttons)… i assume the low poly and the diffuse textures are ready …

     

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