00:00
My name is Ami. I'm the community director for Wildcard and we're doing an exciting event for two reasons. One, because we're joined by our studio art director, Chris Moffitt, who's going to give you guys some behind the scenes looks at what an art director does. And as you can see from the screen, share right now, one of the commons that you haven't seen yet. But I'm not going to give anything away. I'll let Moff talk about that in a second. The second thing is that if you minted or if you claimed a wildfile last week, this is the first event that will be officially recorded on Chain on that Wildfile. So if you're here in the stage audience on Discord, then this will show up on your Wildfile. So exciting stuff, but we're here to talk to Chris Moffitt. So let me hand the mic over to you, Chris, and you can tell us a little bit about yourself and where you came from and what you're doing at Wildcard. 

01:00
Awesome. Thanks, AMI. I just want to say thanks to everybody here today to hang out. Yeah. My name is Chris Moffitt. I'm the art director here at Wildcard. And today I'm going to give you guys a glimpse into how a summon takes shape in 3D. A little bit about myself. I've been working in the industry for nearly 23 years, but I've been creating art since I could hold a pencil. Most of the art that I've always gravitated to was character focused, and so my love for character creation kind of carried over into my professional career. So it's something that I've always been really passionate about. But nowadays, as the art director here at Lawcard, most days I primarily use Photoshop and ZBrush to provide feedback to the various teams we work with. But I prefer ZBrush. It's an amazing piece of software. It's like working with Clay, but digitally. 

01:54
It's one of the most enjoyable programs to use because it feels like I'm just able to do anything in it. Everything's limitless in that program. But, yeah, I'm going to be out of practice since I don't really get a chance to work characters from start to finish. So I was really excited to get to do this today and just get a chance to kind of hang out and work on a character. If you're checking out the screen here, this is the software ZBrush. And so we're going to be working on this guy here in the middle. So for this demo, I really wanted to kind of show a summon that we haven't actually done yet. This was concepted long ago by my friend Bart Johnson. He's one of the many talented concept artists that we've worked with on Wildcard. And this creature is just kind of like a fun, fluffy, sort of dog character. 

02:50
I will call him Fluffalub. We don't have a design for him yet, so who knows? You could see him in the future, maybe his ability may be just to distract other summons with his cuteness, but we'll see where he ends up. We'll go ahead and get started here. So one of the things that what you'll see here is when working on a new summon, we like to have reference handy from other creatures or other summons that we've already created. And so it's just good to have that reference so that we're not getting too detailed in some of the detail elements. We want to make sure that it's consistent so that it still fits the look of the love above house summons. So we'll start with this, just a real basic primary shape. We're just going to start blocking out the shape of the head from the side here. 

03:49
This is pretty much how most summons start. Most characters will just kind of start blocking out with kind of some primary forms and just kind of start to get some of those shapes blocked in. And it's always helpful to have side view concept, some sculptors like to have that, like to have a side, a front view. It's not always necessary, but it just really depends on who you're working with. But it's always handy to have an accurate orthographic view from the side front. So, yeah, we're just going to start blocking out, getting some of these planes kind of defined. So this would be kind of the area where the snout would start to come out. And you can kind of see that this mesh is quadded, it's clean. There's this tool in ZBrush called Dynamesh. And what that does is it kind of allows the mesh to be pushed and pulled in ways that it allows the artist to just be really free form and not have to worry about topology, because this is really just such a fast kind of way to just rough out shapes and block things out and just kind of play around. 

05:11
And you don't want to be restricted to having to worry about topology stretching. And what I mean by that is the topology is made up of these polygons, which are little squares, little quads that make up the full mesh. And without that, if we didn't have this feature, if you start pushing and pulling, you lose surface detail and you lose the ability. You don't have as much density to work with. And so this is such a great tool because I can add new shapes, I can add a cube here, as you can see, for this snout, and just kind of smooth it and move it around. And once I clear that mask that's on the overall head and then remash, it will combine this mesh to the main head. And you'll see that here. So these are all now combined into one mesh. What we have is this just super rough block out. 

06:15
We're starting to kind of get something that resembles a mouth here. We've got a jaw and lower mouth and so we'll start widening out the neck and start getting this sort of chunky, thick, fluffy head that this summon has. Here we'll start reshaping. We have this move brushes. There's a lot of really great brushes in here. So you have just your simple move brush so you can move things around from the camera. And there's ways to if you notice there's a few times where I'll mask off an area that means that area will not move and the rest will I'll be able to edit anything that's unmasked. So here we'll start pushing in the eye socket area. Start kind of flattening that out and start trying to shape the upper lip. Kind of have that come down a little further. Just kind of move things around till it starts to feel close to the concept there. 

07:21
Just going to add some more volume there under the chin. Like I said, this is a Dynamesh, so you don't have to worry too much about how clean everything is just yet. Think of this as like sort of a rough sketch, like quick, kind of under drawing and then things start to kind of start to take shape more and more as we go. We'll start getting some horns in here. Just going to block these out. Take a simple shape and you can really use anything. These horns will have like hard edges and they'll start to feel more like wood. But just kind of really just trying to get that overall curve that's in the concept and then we can just kind of flatten things out as needed. So get that there. Just kind of get it in place and rotate that around. Make sure that it's close in size to the concept and angled properly, a lot of this blockout phase would so you're just going to see ahead today. 

08:32
But typically what we would do is block out the entire character and then take that and hand it off to someone like Woody who would then add a rig and get just a very quick set of block out animations. Go ahead and mirror the horns there. Starting to get some shapes that are resembling the concept there. Just getting all the pieces in place is a great way to start and then from there you just kind of refine and polish. So here we're just kind of remashing these horns so that we get a nice clean get some nice clean topology because we probably won't do much more pushing and pulling and stretching of those. So that should be a good sculpting surface to work with. Go ahead and push the mouth cavity back a little further. We want to make sure that all of our summons, or as many as possible, if they have a face, we want to make sure that they can open their mouth, that they have a tongue, that they have a full set of eyes and eyelids and things like that. 

09:45
So that we can get some really expressive poses of those guys. And a lot of times we'll do marketing renders and just different pieces of key art. That where we'll want to show off their personalities. We're just kind of working on getting the interior, I think getting this kind of mouth shaped a little better, getting some clean topology. Now we can start adding let's see, we're lining up with the concept. Things are looking pretty good from the side that we need to do a bit of cleanup around the mouth here. Just kind of adjust the upper lip and then try to make some room for those teeth when we get those teeth and gums in there. But this program really is like it's just like having a piece of clay once, looking at this interface. A lot of people who use ZBrush when they first start using it's an overwhelming interface. 

11:02
But once you kind of figure out where all the different tools are that you can use, you can customize your UI as well. So you can kind of see at the bottom there. I've made a custom palette at the bottom just for my most used, the brushes that I use most and a couple of materials that I like to use. So we'll get the eye just kind of blocked in here and placed. We'll go ahead and mirror it across and we'll just get some color on it. It always helps to see the eye placement and at least for me personally, I like to throw some color on there just so we can see the personality and a little bit of life from the eyes. We'll go ahead and get some color there and then the great thing is that because these are all separate objects, we can move those things around, adjust them at any time. 

12:08
They're not a part of the head you can see on the right. It's almost like layers. You have all the different objects starting with, I think, the reference images, the two reference images. And then you've got the head, the horns and the eyes. So we'll keep all those things separate so we can always move them around. We'll get the iris kind of blocked in a lot of times too, as we're working on when the artists are sculpting characters and kind of sharing progress as they go, sometimes things can stray a bit from the concept. It doesn't have to exactly match the concept. It's just more about capturing the vibe and the essence of the character. A lot of times, even once a character is fully textured and in game, there's still things that may change. So there may be surface details that got too busy and noisy for their size or maybe their colors aren't working well on the battlefield or they're too contrasty. 

13:28
There's lots of little adjustments that we'll make in all the different stages of the process. Even you can see, I think, in the original concept, the pupils were probably a lot smaller, which makes them look a little crazy. So I think I went a bit bigger with the pupils for this one. So here I'm just taking the duplicating, the eyeballs and scaling them up and just kind of creating these eyelids that hug the eyes, and I can adjust them and move them around. This is something we like to use a lot on our summons because having separate eyelid objects gives us a lot more control. It's just a lot easier versus trying to attach the eyelid to the actual head mesh, because then when you go to prepare the model for animator or someone setting up a rig, the eyelids would have to be they would have to be in a relaxed pose. 

14:33
They'd have to come down over the eyelids and all that sort of thing. And this gives us a lot more flexibility there. Start blocking out the nose. Just kind of checking proportions. A lot of times, too, when you look at a concept, for a 3D artist to follow a concept, it's kind of like looking at the light. 

15:18
Moffitt muted. Somehow you're muted. 

15:34
Can you hear me now? 

15:35
There you go. Now we can hear you. 

15:37
When I tried to unmute myself, it said, Server muted. I don't know how that happened, but that's interesting. 

15:46
Yeah, I'm not sure. Sorry about that. 

15:49
That's all good. Yeah, let's see. So, yeah, there's a lot of different relationships between different elements and features of the face that kind of make that character look like the character in the concept. So trying to make sure those things are accurate. We're just trying to get a tongue blocked out here. And a lot of times, too. What we try to do is when we're finishing a high poly character before we take it into the next stage, which would be the low poly version of that character, we try to make sure that we're capturing the personality. So we may put the character in a pose and just kind of do something fun with it, just to kind of really show off who that guy is. So with this one here, once we have a finished high poly, we would do a pose and a render. 

17:03
And then once that's approved, we would send this to an outsource group to make the low polymesh. And basically what that means is the low poly would be something that can actually run an engine. So what you're seeing here with these meshes, there are millions of polygons. And a lot of times, any given character can be close to 50 million polygons, and that would never run in an engine. So what we do is we would have a low poly cage that's built around this character. So it would only pick up the low poly cage would only encompass the large shapes and any little details like the nostrils. All that information would get baked into a normal map and then that normal map, it would create this sort of impression of added detail that's not actually there in the model. So that's really how all game characters now are done, is with a high poly and a low polymap bake. 

18:15
So we're getting a lower lip kind of blocked out and roughed in. One of the things that is nice about ZBrush is that you can just use the mask tool and just kind of mask off an area and then extract that from that mesh and create a new mesh. And so that's what you'll see here. I'll do that a lot in this process, is just pushing and pulling and grabbing things. Kind of like the tongue was masked out off from the inside of the mouth and extracted. So we'll start using a clay. This is called a clay buildup brush. And this just kind of allows me to just kind of add volume and just kind of layer by layer and get a little bit more shape to that upper lip, get some more little bit of detail here in that mouth corner just to kind of define that a little better. 

19:31
Start making some room for the teeth and gums in here. He's looking a little terrified right now. We'll get him in a cuter state, I promise. Like a deer in headlights right now. All right, so we're just going to duplicate the lower lip and just expand that to create a set of gums and get that in place. We'll just kind of move things around. And there's just so many really amazing brushes in here. There's inflate there's, hard surface, move brush, insert mesh. There's just a million if I pulled up the brush palette, it's crazy. There's probably easily 100 brushes just by default in the program, but these are just kind of my go to ones that I like to use. So we're just going to mirror the gums up for the top of the mouth. We're just going to move those down, get those in place, and we'll get some teeth on this guy, give him some chompers. 

21:18
And so once this head is in a pretty good spot, I won't be able to do it for this demo today. But the great thing about this program is I can extrude from the neck and just continue across the shape of the body and start blocking out the body and keep going and adding. But you can really get a pretty decent block out within a couple of hours. So this in total took about an hour to record, but half a day. You can have a good block out for a character and have it handed off to animator and get it in game. Let's see. We'll get some teeth going here, get a real simple shape. Doesn't have to be too detailed. He's got egg teeth. We'll just kind of give him some incisors. Nothing too dangerous, though, because I don't think he bites. He's too sweet. 

22:33
He's too much of a cutie. We'll just give him a little bit of an edge on the back. All right. Should be good place. The other thing, too, that ZBrush has, I don't know if I mentioned it, but is just the mirroring Tool is such a great to be able to work one side and have it update on the other is just amazing. I worked in clay on a few different sculptures just for fun. And it was funny because I had already been using ZBrush and I did one ear, and then when I went to the other side to do the other ear, I'm so lazy, it made me lazy. I didn't want to sculpt the whole ear and make it exactly mirrored. So, yeah, get a little spoiled using this program. So now I'm just duplicating the teeth. Getting those in place. Starting to see that personality come through here. 

24:04
And then we'll just kind of move the gums around and kind of inflate them a little bit so that the teeth are kind of seated more in the gums. And like I said, this is really just like a first pass. So there would be a lot more refinement where we go in and make sure that the teeth and gums have enough space so that animation can create a nice rig, a nice facial rig so that he can snarl, he can kind of just get the full range of motions. Getting some more of that. Yeah, his little nubby teeth has been chewing on logs never worn down. Get those bottom ones in there. Get those out of the tongue. All right, that should be good for teeth. Come back to those later. See, move these eyes down on the concept. It looks like the eyes are moving. 

25:44
They're kind of lower on the head, more in line with the nose. So kind of gives them a bit more of that cute factor. It's one thing that with cuter characters, you'll see a lot of cuter characters will have big eyes and they'll have much bigger forehead. So the top half of their head is larger and the face is kind of more scrunched down into the lower half of the face. So big teeth, big eyes, kind of helps get that cute factor. But it's tricky. It's a tricky balance because this guy is pretty good about I think Lump is about as tall as Bogar. So this guy's maybe a couple heads shorter than Lump, so he'll still need to look we don't want him to look too small. So his body proportions would be a bit larger. To kind of help with that, I'm just going to just kind of rough out some color here to kind of help make sure that all the different proportions are kind of lining up and just make sure that we're in a good spot before we get too far. 

27:07
And this process is really this is called polypainting. And what this is you're basically filling each of those tiny little millions of polygons. You're filling them with color. So the color is applied to the polygon itself. And it's not really a texture until it's been recreated in low poly. And then that low poly would have would get what's called a UV unwrap. So all the UV coordinates would be unwrapped and flattened to where you could paint directly onto the model and then output a texture that would be in another program. But in ZBrush, it's really just painting the actual polys, just kind of blocking out these shapes here's. His horns look like this could be a stuffed animal version of this. Just put a little seam along the edge and step in. Just give them a little cheekbones here. Give them a little more. Just a little bit of bone structure, but not too much. 

28:31
We don't want them looking scary. But just something that looks like it could actually house the eyeballs here. A little bit of bone structure, but not too much. Just something that looks like it could actually house the eyeballs. This is the mask tool that I was talking about earlier. So just being able to draw a shape onto the surface and then extract that as a shape or as a new object is really useful. So from there, I'll just pop that off the head. It'll just be its own thing. And so now you have like this little one of these little leaf objects. And so I'll go and remash that and smooth it out a little bit. It's kind of wobbly right now. And then we can rotate that into place and flatten it out a little bit. And then from there, I can just duplicate those and just kind of quickly make a little bunch of them. 

29:55
And so with a lot of the love above creatures, we have a lot of leaves on them. So what we typically will do is we'll turn these into cards, which is basically an alpha plane. So you can imagine the card would be a plane that has an image of the leaf on it and then all the outside edges of the leaf would be transparent. And so those little cards would then be duplicated all over the mesh to give that feeling of this bushy leafy kind of surface. So we can start with a few of these here and then we'll use a combination of these cards as well as sculpted detail. So we can also make an alpha stamp that will then be used across the surface of all the green area and kind of create this sort of textured feel. But then when you add the cards, it kind of creates that illusion of this really dense bushy character. 

31:09
See, I'll just reuse these pieces over and over to kind of get that sort of leafy, those little leafy bunches. And yeah, starting to feel pretty good. Just kind of add a few more. We need to add a little more volume to the head. You can see in the concept that he has kind of this sort of like a main and so it's helpful to kind of have a separate mesh to work with for that. So can mask that off and extract that as a separate mesh. This is really handy for when you're making characters that have tight fitted clothing. If you were trying to make sort of a hood, you can build it that way, you can create gloves that way really easily. There's just so many ways to use that feature. Just makes it really fast. So just kind of getting that smoothed out and the mesh topology sort of cleaned up and then from there we can just start pushing and pulling things in and you'll see kind of where in the concept there's this sort of nice gradient that goes from the green into the tan. 

32:45
And what we'll do is that'll kind of get smoothed out in the texturing phase. If we want to add in gradients and little details like that to kind of blend those surfaces together, that's something that would be handled in the texturing process. We're just going to duplicate these around a little bit more, right? And then just try to add a little bit more volume just to kind of make it give the impression of hair or fur without getting too detailed about it. But just to kind of get that vibe helps. And this is the clay build up. So it's just like adding strips of clay to the surface. Feeling pretty good there. Just kind of move some things around and let's see, I think the eyelids probably could be or they could be a little darker just to kind of help really make the eyes stand out. 

34:21
Let's get some hard surface edges on these horns. So the horns really just they don't need a lot really. Just a hard surface brush will give us these ridges and then kind of flatten out the ends of them and add some wood grain and hopefully that's enough to kind of come across as wood. And then later we can go in during the detail pass and add in little runes or little things that were in the concept, symbols or things like that. So this is kind of like a really tight detail brush that just allows us to get really sharp details. It's perfect for wood grain. Just get some of that added in there and it's mirrored on both sides. But a lot of times we like to try to go in at the very end and just give it a little more asymmetry. So not everything is perfectly symmetrical so it gives them a little more personality. 

35:30
So we might have one horn sharp and then have the other one kind of blunt like it got chipped or flattened or something and it just gives them a little bit of personality. Like to do that too with the teeth. So a lot of times with teeth, if you've ever watched anyone draw a caricature of someone, the teeth and the gaps and the shapes of the teeth are really sort of the landmarks for what makes someone's teeth unique to. So that's something it's fun to think about too, when creating some of these. Just maybe he's got maybe his two front teeth, one's bigger than the other or one's a different shape, or one's turned a little know you see that in a lot of Disney and Pixar films. They'll do that with a lot of their really fun to see that all those different unique personality traits come out in those characters. 

36:26
But yeah, so we're just getting some leaves added here to kind of give the impression that his horns are kind of nestled in this big bushy mane. Just kind of put these around here. Maybe add a few more up on top to kind of finish up the top open and add some more get some more that blue color. Let's see. And then else we do here, maybe just moving up the cheekbones to get that sort of cute, little bit more of that chubby cheek kind of vibe on his eyes there. Just kind of move that up. And then to get the eyelids moved as well to kind of match that kind of helps him feel a little cuter there. Just kind of fix the cheekbones fit. And let's see. Get some color on the inside of his mouth there. Don't have probably didn't have to do that bug with me. 

38:12
There we go. So, yeah, then this is just a little preview AO to kind of see how the AO might kind of define some of these different facial features. But, yeah, that's pretty much get a little red in the nose there. Smooth that out and see. Yeah, we save that. Always save your file. This program will crash on you sometimes. Lost a lot of work, so I try to save often. But, yeah, there we go. So that's pretty much how our summons get made. At least that's kind of how they start anyway. But, yeah, that's it. It's pretty much the demo. Hope you all enjoyed it. 

39:23
That was absolutely incredible. I said the same thing when he was doing his, but it's like watching magic happen. And I think all of us in Chat kind of agree, like, if were armed with some clay and brushes, anything that we did would not turn out like that. 

39:45
I highly recommend, if you haven't tried ZBrush, I think there is a free demo. You can download it and mess around with it. There's a million tutorials out there. 

39:53
Yeah, so I did want to ask a little bit about that. And someone in Chat did mention that they were about to start getting their feet wet with 3D modeling too. So is there any reason why you chose ZBrush as your kind of thing, your program of choice? Anything like Pros for that versus other programs, anything like that? 

40:16
Yeah, ZBrush came out back in 2004 and so I was really excited about it when it first came out. So I started using it, but there were others after that. There was Mudbox, which I also used quite a bit on Halo Wars when I worked at Ensemble. And it was a really great program. I felt like it was a little limited. It didn't have as many options because I had already spent a lot of time in ZBrush. And so going to Mudbox wasn't as good. But now Blender has a really great Sculpting tool set that I have been playing with as well. And so that one is actually probably a better program just for beginners people wanting to get into it just because it has a very simple set of things. The interface is a lot easier to just kind of grasp and yeah, it has a lot of the same features. 

41:16
So I definitely recommend Blender for digital sculpting. 

41:22
Thanks. Great tip. I got a question in from Monty, which is I'm curious of too. They ask what the most frustrating thing is to model. Like the drawing hands of 3D modeling. 

41:34
Yeah, actually it's hands are very they can be very difficult. I would say the face, human faces can be very challenging if you're trying to get a realistic if you're trying to do a photoreal sculpture of someone, it takes a lot of reference gathering and research and just really understanding anatomy. So, yeah, that is one that I still struggle with today. I'm always learning new things about the subtle, the nuances of anatomy and how it all comes together. So, yeah, that's a good one. 

42:18
Awesome. And so we saw kind of like the mirroring trick as you were going to get kind of symmetry and shortcut a little bit. Are there any other useful shortcuts or resources or anything that kind of make your work easier day to day? 

42:33
Yeah, let's see. Well, I didn't really go over it, but on the right hand side, where you see all the different individual objects, you can also group those into folders. That's something that I have been using a lot more. It was something me and other sculptors were asking for, was having a way to organize all of your different they're called subtools, all your subtools into different folders. So that's a feature I would highly recommend using. Just helps keep everything organized and clean. But yeah, that's one I'd recommend. 

43:11
Good deal. Okay, so you touched on this a little bit as you were going, but I was a little bit confused. And maybe you can use more detail if you could offer it on what exactly like UV and texture and all of that means, like, what that next step looks like. 

43:30
Yeah, I guess the best way to explain that is when you have a game mesh and it's made up of fewer polygons, those polygons, they need what's called texture coordinates. And so if you imagine sort of like if you look at how a shirt is made, right, and you take a shirt and you separate it at the seams and lay it out into all its parts, that's probably the best way to explain that. So, like, with the head, there would be a seam that goes down the middle or down the back, and then everything would just get unwrapped. And so it's really just the model stays 3D, but what you're seeing is in a separate window, you're seeing the UV coordinates unwrapped. That way, when you go to transfer the information from the high poly to the texture, it has a specific UV coordinate that's unique to every polygon in that unwrap. 

44:37
And so when you look at a texture for a character, you're going to see it's like a bunch of clothing almost. It's like if you took pants and pulled those apart at the seams, you'd have a front and a back and you would have arms the same way. And all that kind of stuff would be all unwrapped and laid out into a nice clean square of texture coordinates. 

45:01
Pattern, but in reverse. 

45:03
Yeah, exactly. 

45:04
That makes sense. Okay, cool. I had a question. Hold on, let me see if I can get that back. Oh, when you're modeling this high poly version, are you doing anything keeping the low poly transition in mind? Like, do you simplify shapes on purpose or anything like that to prepare for low poly or make it easier for them? 

45:25
Yeah, that's a great question. That is something that we try to do is, for instance, these little leaves, I think is probably a good example of that. If you're not thinking about that, it's going to make it a lot harder to take all those leaves and then transfer them to the cards, those little texture cards. And so keeping that in mind and thinking about so you can see how I was placing those leaves in groups of threes or whatever, I'm thinking of, okay, that's eventually going to be a card that information will just get baked onto. And then once I have that baked on a card, I can just duplicate that card wherever and those leaves would be repeated all over. So I don't have to get this character finalized in the high poly stage. I probably wouldn't go and populate his whole body with all those leaves. 

46:27
I would probably just put a few here and there and then people would know, like, oh, yeah, eventually he'll be covered in leaves. But this is just kind of the here's some examples on the character of where those leaves will be and how they'll look. 

46:43
I love it. Okay, I see some more questions coming in. I do apologize. I'll see if I can get those over to Moffitt afterward. But unfortunately, we are running up against the end of our time today and I want to make sure we have time to say a proper goodbye. So, first of all, thank you to everyone in the audience, either on social media or here in Discord, for joining us today. Moffitt, did you want to say any final words before we log off for the day? 

47:11
I just want to say the same thing. Thanks for joining us and really appreciate your time and being here and hanging out with us. It was fun. 

47:18
Awesome. Yeah. So thank you so much again. If you guys do have your wildfiles, as soon as we close out the stage today, it will record this first event. So that's super exciting. We'll be doing more events just like this one. We've got more work and chills, we've got Fireside chats, we got play tests coming, lots of stuff coming your way. So I'm excited to have done this first one with y'all, and there'll be more where it came from. Moff, thanks again for your time and we'll see you all in the chats. 

47:46
Thanks, everyone. See ya. 

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