THE GAME MODELLING PIPELINE
Art director Pawel Libiszewski shares his process for modelling a villain for video game Shadow Warrior 2
Art director Pawel Libiszewski shares his process for modelling the villain, Tree Face, for video game Shadow Warrior 2
i Wanted to give treeface lots of knots AND cracks Pawel Libiszewski, art director, Flying wild hog
C reating a new character for a video game can be a challenge. We caught up with Flying Wild Hog’s art director Pawel Libiszewski to discover his pro workflow for creating a detailed demonic character for the video game Shadow Warrior 2.
Before any modelling began, the team needed to create a backstory and concept for the character, in this case Demon Treeface. “We wanted a character that was not based on a human skeleton because we already had a lot of humanoid characters in the game. This demon had to live in a setting called Shadow Land and it was full of various other demons and mutated vegetation,” says Pawel.
Concept artist Pawel Swiezak then created hundreds of thumbnails, and after the art director picked one to work up, the modelling began. Pawel worked in two stages at this point, first creating a 3D ‘blob’ mesh to run in the game engine and then secondly finalising the concept in 2D.
“In Zbrush, the ideal tool to use to create a 3D mesh from the thumbnail is Zspheres. Thanks to them, I quickly created my blob mesh that was then exported to the game” says Pawel (see image 1a). This is done to see the character from the player’s perspective. Because of this, says Pawel, “we decided to make him around two metres high in a neutral pose.”
After reflecting on the finalised 2D concept art (see The Final Concept on page 26), Pawel was able to begin creating the high poly model by refining the concept in Zbrush. He explains: “I wanted to modify details of his woody skin and give Treeface the character of an old tree with a lot of knots and cracks. The starting point was the blob mesh. I made a new, clean topology using Zremesher and started to add bigger details.