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Thanks to Drama Princess, the characters (or “Actors” as we call them) in The Path are aware of their environment. This allows them to look at objects in their vicinity. The picture is made of several super-imposed screenshots taken from a tool external to the game, where we visualize the Actor’s activity with lines and blocks, so we know what’s going on in their heads.
i screenshot i took of them all together soon after i’d finished the first versions of all the girl models.
I feel responsible for her. Someone has to. She is always looking after the others. First born but last made. I think some of my weariness rubbed off on her. She was made in such a lazy way. Forced to grow up before she was ready.
This is not to say that I don’t find her perfect. I sketched her after being inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman, the mannerisms and characters of his actresses, especially the lovely Liv Ullmann. It is hard to say if what I felt I learned by watching his movies has been injected vertex by vertex into Scarlet…. but I believe a little bit remains.
She is a serious young lady. More images of her are shown in the gallery and on flickr. She’s looking a bit frightening in the wallpaper, but i think it’s just her way of dealing with a frightening world. Let us all wish her well.
Well, well, well, now we’ve come full circle. She’s the one you’ve seen the most, if you’ve been paying attention round here. But what do you *really* know about dear Ruby, eh? “You think you know me?” as she is fond of saying with a sneer (okay, at least in my imagination.)
When we had to decide which character to make first, I said it immediately, Ruby is the one! Through working out her character and style we solidified what all the characters would be…. how can I say, Before her, we had no idea what we were making. Ruby helped us figure all of it out. What’s more, she’s the girl who, for me, totally epitomized what I felt about my time growing up. What happens to her, could have happened to me. She’s like a friend I never had but still remember… or a long lost sister of my dreams…. Anyway, all that is to say, she’s been through a lot during the long process of getting here. To a final image.
The process started with lots of looking around on the Internet for images and inspiration. I found her absolutely in the short skirts and red knees of Fuco Ueda‘s girls and the undulating necks of Audrey Kawsaki‘s fantasies, pretty and distant. But, what kind of girl was she? Had to figure that out. Then I sketched around on paper and in computer til I had her.
Ah, nostalgia 😉
There are the usual beauty shots of her in the gallery, and some other things will be showing up on flickr. I made a strange and unusual image of her for your desktop, hope you like it!
All hail the fearless, little Ginger!
I think every parent has a favourite child. You don’t let them know it, but there is one that always surprises you. One that reflects the best of you while still becoming their own person. Ginger was always my favourite. Not only was she the one I feel I finally modeled perfectly correct, but with the animation’s Laura made for her, she’s absolutely not like the other girls. Also even though she is 13, she is smaller than her little sister Rose… something she is not happy about. 😉
In my original sketch she was more boy-ish. But I changed my mind to make her a little more flirty and feminine after revisiting a favorite film of ours:
The hair, necklace and penchant for playing with wolves are pretty much where the similarities end, I think making Ginger more of a little girl who doesn’t know her own beauty was a successful choice.
She is outgoing and active, and is a lot of fun in the game! 🙂
More images in the gallery and on Flickr. Plus another wallpaper at the downloads page.
We’ve had a lot of trouble making characters cast shadows in the game. Our engine uses a technique called Stencil Shadows. Those can be created very fast on the videocard. Except that they don’t work with characters! So we always had to resort to a very slow software-based solution. In The Path, turning on shadows could easily reduce the framerate by a quarter.
So we started experimenting a little and came up with an extremely primitive yet efficient solution. Instead of using the deformed mesh of the character to cast the shadow, we modelled simple shapes that approximated the character’s different body parts (head, arms, pelvis, etc).
Then we render these in the place where they are in the game (at the position where the character’s skeleton’s bones are). It is this collection of simple objects that we use to cast the shadow.
Of course the result is a very crude shape. So then we blur the shadow to make it look pretty. Which is kind of a bonus, because soft shadows are another thing that is hard to do in games.
The result is realtime shadows that look nice and cause virtually no framerate reduction.
Rose is a quiet one…..
I don’t even remember her walking into the room, but one day there she was.
I thought she seemed a bit too jealous of her older sister so I made her skirt longer than in my initial sketch. The lace I added later seemed to express her innocence but also the visceral quality of lace… kind of like veins.
If I talk inspiration of her character it would be Lain (from the anime Serial Experiments Lain) which I watched again for the thousandth time when I was planning the characters. I loved the hairstyle so much I made a variation for Rose. Here, the intro to the show:
And then in the course of looking through all the amazing artists work out there I must say one thats stuck with me is Esao Andrews… he deserves a separate Inspirations post but for now I’ll leave you with this painting.
Finch by Esao Andrews
You will find a new wallpaper on the downloads page too.
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-caped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
by Humbert Humbert, literary wolf.
Introducing Carmen!
What can I say about Carmen… In contrast to Robin, she has been nothing but trouble. We wanted to show her to you now, just so you don’t think the Red Girls are all sweetness and light. The original party girl, when she’s not breaking curfew she’s giving me fits trying to get her topology correct… not sure I ever got it correct, her curves were dangerous, even to me.
While all the characters were heavily inspired by doll designs, she was perhaps the most evidently so. I based her silhouette absolutely on images of dolls that I found. Sketched out a design for her. I actually had to model her twice, as after her first version I was advised that the way I’d done her shoulders, knees and elbows would never deform correctly during animation. So I rebuilt her… funny how making something that everyone makes, a sexy girl in 3d, gives me the most trouble… typical, for me anyway.
Beauty may be more than skin deep but I think she turned out pretty well for a shell. See her with her make-up on in the gallery and on our flickr page and don’t forget the exclusive wallpaper for your computer desktop in the downloads section.
We will be releasing official images and info of all The Path characters, starting now and every 2 weeks til you’ve seen them all (well… almost all, have to save some surprises to be discovered, naturally.) And as we show the finished images out front, I’ll be back here giving away all my secrets. Work. In. Progess.
(click the above to see them larger) She started as inspiration in the form of an outfit Michael’s daughter wore one day. Then she was next seen as a (bad) sketch, by me. From there, there was no stopping her emergence!
A quick VERY WORK IN PROGRESS shot of her in the game with the realtime 3d screenshot equivalent of red-eye making her look up to no good! But really, she’s a good kid.
Some final beauty shots to see in the Path gallery and on flickr aaand a desktop wallpaper for you to download.
& just WAIT til you see her MOVE! 😉
