Rogue_5's Comlink - Player Character Appearance Improvements - June 23, 2006

Hello,

I would like talk about some upcoming improvements that the Art team is working on. But first, let me introduce myself, I am Jason Minor and I’ve been working on SWG for five years now as an artist. I took over as the Character Lead towards the end of Rage of the Wookiee and shortly after The Trials of Obi Wan I became the Art Director. As many of you know, this year has been a little different for us on SWG, we are not doing an Expansion in favor of directing our efforts toward fixing, cleaning, and improving the entire game experience for everyone. In this vein, the Art team has been looking into what we can do to improve the aesthetic of the game and update our more “dated” assets.

One of the things we have come up with is to do a pass on the Player Characters. This however is more easily said than accomplished. There were two main hurtles we had to overcome, the first being the overwhelming complexity of the customization system in SWG. The level to which SWG allows customization of your avatar is unsurpassed by any game before it and any I’ve seen since. This has as many negatives as it does positives. The chief among these negatives is the amount of time it takes to create a new player character. In order to build all the meshes that allow for the variations between fat, skinny, and muscular – as well and the hundreds of subtle variations that can be made to the face, coupled with the many variations of hair, clothing, make-up, patterns, freckles, and so on – it takes anywhere from one to two months to create a new race. When you compound this by the fact that we have ten player species, you are looking at well over a year to completely redress the Player Characters. Obviously, we don’t have the time or resources to reasonably accomplish this.

The second hurtle to a complete revamp, is that the game has been live for three years. To completely change an avatar that a player has spent three years crafting seem rather…unkind.

So, what can we do? Well, we decided was to meet these problems half way. Instead of reworking the player models completely, we have decided to make changes only to the textures of the models. By using next gen normal mapping techniques, adding color variation to the base textures, and making good use of specular maps we’ve been able to get some results we are happy with. These changes can be made in a timely fashion and do not change any of the customization of your characters – your characters should look the same, just better. The initial results are what I am presenting here. Please remember that these are experiments we have done and the final product may (and probably will) alter.

This first shot is just reworking the human head. We started with humans as they can be the most difficult to nail down and have the widest variety of customization to account for. This first test is using next gen normal maps, new color maps and new spec maps. The goal here was to give the skin tone a richer and more natural feel, to define the features more, and to use the specular map to call out areas of the face that are more shinny.

(Click to Enlarge)

The next two shots are the same, however, they run through several different customization combinations showing how the new textures will fit with the existing system.

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

This last shot is an experiment with the full body. The shot below is only using normal maps; there are no differences in the base textures or the specular maps.

(Click to Enlarge)

We are hoping to release the improvements to the Humans, Zabrak, and Twilikes in the Chapter 2 game update. The reason for releasing these three first is that they all share the same or nearly the same maps and all three can be done in time for one update. Two more species will be released with each following update until all the races have been revamped. There are additional improvements we are considering as well however these haven’t all been worked out yet. I will keep you informed.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this sneak peak at some of the work we are doing for you and we welcome your feedback.

Thanks,

Jason Minor
Art Director, SWG