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Hi my name is Mike Kime. I’m a characer artist at Epic Games on our MOBA Paragon.

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Epic games has 26 years in development and over 40 games. We are largely known for Unreal Tournament and Gears of War and are also known for having a high quality bar.

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Paragon is our third person action MOBA. We continually supports this 60fps product with unique heroes backed by fun gameplay and high end visuals.

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On Paragon the character team is tasked with releasing a technically sound and fully realized hero every 3 weeks.

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I would like to show a video of our brand new character Revenant to help display the quality we achive in Unreal for Paragon.

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Revenant Video

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When we originally launched Paragon it had 13 heroes to chose from

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Currently we have about 30

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And now with our modern pipeline, which I will be covering, we have created over 120 skins.

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In this presentation we will be starting from the initial design document and go through through hero content creation and finally textures and materials in Unreal Engine 4. In this image you can also get an idea of the individual teams we have on Paragon and also the average time they spend on a single hero.

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Up first I would like to do a brief overview of Hero design. In Paragon every hero is very different and sky is the limit. It can almost feel like designing a new game with each new hero

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Design begins as a colaboration between design leads and the art director.

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A document is created outlining the heroes kit including traits and abilities.

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From there a playable hero is started right away.

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This is what a hero document looks like for Paragon.

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A mini backstory fuels the initial feel and play of the hero. For instance this hero is an assassin

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And you can also see the traits and abilities are layed out even including fun names for all of the abilities. The designer emmediately goes to work making this hero playable and making these abilities funcitonal.

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And here we have a video showing one of these. The designer is practicing this new heroes abilities and attacks inside our demo combat bowl. In this case the designer has altered the FX of one of our popular mages and repurposed them for this heroes attacks.

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And here is one that is using fully textured assets as well as audio from one of our rock monster heroes. So who is this guy that they are using?!

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That is one of our proto models. We created these so designers have something to use in an early design. They are fully rigged and come with basic animations so the designer can get to work quickly.

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Also established at this stage is the characters overall size. This is a height chart that we maintain showing different hero archetypes for the game their sizes. We try to “lock in” size and proportions early. Our average human hero is about 6ft which is 183cm tall.

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So what drives all these assets? Blueprints! These are a very important and key part to how Epic creates Paragon at a rapid pace.

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Here is what a common, simple, yet effective blueprint looks like for a hero ability. These play a massive role in the pipeline on Paragon. This blueprint here is used for a to throw a daggar. This Blueprint can be copied and pasted into other heroes to jump start an ability.

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Here is that same blueprint in action in the engine. You can see the ability activate, and then resolve out. Blueprints give a great visualiztion of what is happening while actually playing the game.

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And here we have a complex blueprint special built for a heroes ultimate. Blueprints can go deep are our true building blocks so grouping and comments are key for organization. You only need to create this once and then it can be altered and reused for other heroes. After gluing the hero together with Blueprints it is always best to!....

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Test early and test often. At Epic we are constantly testing at all stages of hero development. This includes discovering if the idea is a good fit for the paragon brand of heroes. We are looking at proportions and ofcourse play balance. As early as possible the design kit is tested before people spend workhours on its visual concepts. After the team is feeling good about where things are headed then visual ideation begins.

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Which leads us to Concept Art! This is where the initial visualization of the hero begins to come to life.

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The intent of the concepts are to provide a high level visual direction and clarity for the hero and to provide direction for alternate skins. Ultimately the concept artist is also capturing the essense of the hero, which means they are working with our story team on the heroes background.

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So what does a concept artists workflow look like? Well as you can see on the left there they start with quick thumbnails and are rapidly communicating with the Art Director. After things start to narrow down they build a more refined sketch as you can see on the right. This gives us a closer look, but it doesn’t end there.

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They also often provide a kit breakdown based on the design document. The concept artist also creates this to convey how the hero might look in the game executing on their abilities. This can help inform the artists down the pipeline including modeling, rigging, animation, and FX. Also they are responsible for item breakouts as seen on the right like this sword. This helps the modeler know the finer details to incoroporate in the modeling phase.

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And here we have her final concept piece, front and back. The upper back is very important as it is what the player sees during the game. This concept is fully rendered to capture her personality and beauty. But not everything in Paragon is pretty.

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Here we have Grux! One of our brutal creature heroes. Again showing the front and back for clarity. Front is important for character selection and back is important for play. The weapons are nice and large and prominent as they are where the action is. This concept represents the core heroes look and feel.... But this is a MOBA so it doesn’t stop there. We actually have 4 tiers of skins per hero.

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As mentioned our Core Grux...

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Then this would be a Tier 1 skin. Tier one is work done only in texture and material. No modeling, animation, or FX changes. Infact in this case the concept was created by painting over the final game model.

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Here we have a Tier 2 or 3. This is a completely new model with new textures and materials. What can make it a teir 3 is depending on how many animations and FX need to be created.

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And finally tier 4! This is pretty much an all new hero using the same design kit. All new FX and animations and even voice are created for the hero.

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Now we have a large spread of concept art. So what do we do with all this information.

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We load everything in to a tool called Shotgun. We recommend looking in to this organization tool. This is a powerful system that allows everyone to see what is going on in Paragon at work, from home, or on the go. You can log notes, schedule tasks, and keep in touch with the project. In the background here you can see a data stream of uploaded content. Then we use this content for.....

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We have a Kick Off Meeting. All key people at every point of the pipeline are involved in these kickoff meetings.

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They happen throughout the creation of the hero and ideally they occur every time the hero “changes hands” in the pipeline.

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It is the responsibility of the art team to keep in contact with design to ensure all will be working acording to the heroes kit.

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A part of that process is having the dedicated modeler break the hero up in to swappable components. These become skeletal and static attachments. The modeler usually is the mediator between concept and the rest of the pipeline. Concerns can be clipping, texture resolutions, and triangle counts. Here we can see our hero with swappable Armor, Weapon, and Dress, while the core hero remains intact. Once that is done.

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The modeler moves on to the proto model. This is an important step that can take a lot of iteration.

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Here are a handful of proto meshes. As you can see some of them are just decimated parts from zbrush sculpts or basic primitives jammed together. The modeler here is working closely with Rigging to be sure all physics assets and model clipping are in check. Proporitons become increasingly locked in.

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This is a proto animation on a heroes weapon. This was created by the modeler to help the entire team across all disciplines get an idea of how it will work and what will be required down the pipeline. Figuring this out as early in the process as possible is key. As you can see the weapon is made out of basic objects and decimated zbrush sculpts.

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The proto phase is highly important and involves at least the Art Director, Modeler, and rigging team.

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Iteration is key so that animation problems are solved early.

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These meshes should come in around the same triangle count as the final hero will be, for performance reasons.

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The final game asset and proto mesh should be similar.

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Here is an example of that. As you can see some orientation changes were made during the proto phase. It looks like the rigger decided to have the arms moved down. But you can also see that the difference between the final proto mesh and the final low poly is not large. At a glance they are almost the same.

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Here is an early playtest using that proto mesh. In this case animations have been retargeted from previously created heroes. You can see parts and pieces flying off of him. If you look closely here watching his thumb......There goes his thumb! It’s rough, but this is all more than enough to start playtesting the hero in the actual game environment.

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On to the high poly creation process.

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About 4 to 7 weeks of development time.

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To create a fully realized high poly hero using tools of the artists choice such as 3dsmax, Maya, Modo, or Zbrush.

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Reuse as much as possible especially for human heroes.

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Micro detail should be able to be removed so it can be represented in engine. We will get to this later.

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Epic cares about clean hard surface modeling and creating animations for mechanical functional parts.

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These are just some of the reusable parts we have around to make hero generation faster. Whole base human characters as well as items serve to speed up workflow. We like to fully model out the character if possible. When it comes to the art on Paragon we don’t like to have a guessing game so pieces such as eyelashes and eyebrows are reused to bring the character to life in the high poly stage.

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Here is a special kit of feathers and spider webs. The character on the left is using spider webs and both characters have the feather kit. It is encouraged to create these kits and reuse them wherever we can.

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We also have a catalog of scans to choose from for starting off a hero. Here are some of them in Unreal Engine. It is best to see things in your game development environment as early and as often as possible.

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At Epic we have been using Marvelous Designer to create believable folds. This tool has been great for starting off items such as scarves and capes.

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Here is Marvelous in action on one of our heroes. The artist here has created the stencils you see on the right. We can see the simulation happening on the left where the fabric can be pulled in to shape until the artist likes what they see. Then finally this is exported to Zbrush for a sculpting pass.

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Scanned clothing also works very well. Here we can see a combination of of tools to get the final result. Some parts were Marvelous Designer. Some were scan. All of it is gone over in Zbrush.

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As mentioned before all tileable micro details should be able to be removed from the high poly so they can be tiled back during the material process. This can be achieved through layers in Zbrush. It is great to see this on the high poly model but this detail will be later represented in Unreal.

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I thought I would show what it looks like in Unreal. Here is the final game asset with the cloth detail tiled in the normal map. The tiling frequency and strength of detail are controlled by parameters and blended with the base normal map. Also you can see other tiled materials in this image such as the leather and felt on his hat. This gives Paragon a very high resolution look.

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So what should be left to tiling in layers? Cloth, dents, damages and dings. Some facial assymetry is best left on a layer, especially any form of scaring. Any dirt and grime should be created in the material phase as well. This can allow for future options for skins and material changes. So use layers.

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And in the end here is that same weapon you saw as a proto earlier but now is fully modeled in subdivision in 3dsmax. Note that the animations were kept intact during the modeling process to make sure it would function propely and to serve as reference for the rest of the team.

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Here he is fully modeled out and ready for approval. That scarf started out in Marvelous Designer and then was modified and sculpted on in Zbrush. Again the finder details and damages were done on a layer and can be easily removed.

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This is the high poly for Countess. High poly models are taken to a level that we can see what she might look like in game. This includes eyes, hair, and even eyebrows.

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Here is another high poly image showing anatomical sculpting mixed with clean sub surface modeled machinery

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And finallly here is a render where the artist created detailed color and material assignments to help show where materials can be and what they might look like.

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After High Poly it is on to the Low Poly.

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Paragon has Heroes come in at 85 thousand triangles and we care about every one of them. We try to make our heroes look as high poly as we can with the resources we have as Paragon is a 60 FPS product.

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Each hero is approxamatly 4 by 4k texture sheets. This may vary. We are breaking the characters up for swappable pieces so 1 or 2 of those 4k sheets could be broken in to smaller maps for that purpose.

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Again a theme on this project is human hero kits and general reuse across a heroes development.

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And finally each Hero has 5 levels of detail

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For the LODs each are at half the triangle count of the previous. We sometimes use reduction tools to assist us in this process but our top LODs are done by hand. LOD0 is our top 85 thousand triangle piece while LOD4 is just over 5 thousand triangles... A count easily still 3 to 4 times higher resolution than an entire character back when I first started in this industry!

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We can see Shinbi here is broken into 4 4k UV islands and includes several human hero kits. This is broken into 16 material ids but these heroes can range from 10 to 20. Artists try to trace the triangles around the appropriate areas as best as possible. This can include skin, cloth, or any special material we might utilize. You can see that breakup represented on the right. Each color you see is an ID. The skin is on it’s own ID. And the cloth is always on it’s own ID.

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Here is how I like the cloth. Straight Uvs for tiling textures and nice quaded topology. As long as it is all on its own Material ID Unreal will take care of the rest. As you can see Unreal provides all of the wrinkles and visual believablility no longer nesessary in a normal map.

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A Closer look at our eyes. Our eyes are a very import part of our heroes. The eye setup is broken down into components. First off the base eye including the cornea bump.

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Then there is a wetness outline that goes around where the eyelids meet the eyeball. This only displays reflection.

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Then we have a shade plate over the eye that only multiplies a shadow, for depth.

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Then finally a universal eyelash mesh that many of our characters use. This uses a very simple and soft material.

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In our engine for our eye shader to work the UVS are not mirrored. They must match the objects orientation.

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And here is our complex Eye shader as seen on the left. But what is important are all the controlable and scalable parameters an artist can play with represented on the right. The core material is piped into a Material Instance where you can control the Iris Size. Brightness. Color. Pupil Size is very important. And then the depth scaling which is used to counteract the cornea bump. So lets look at that.

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Here is a video specifically calling out that depth scaling. As you play with the value you can see the iris and pupil pressing into the eyeball while the reflections remain steadily reacting to the geometry of the eyeballs cornea. Pretty cool!

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Looking at some more parameters we have control of the color of the eyes. Radius. Brightness. Limbus. Pupile scale. Sclera Brightness. Shadows. Reflections and Glow.

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The mouth is a very simple piece of reusable geometry that is on it’s own Material ID as well. The material for this uses heavy sub surface scattering. This piece is reused across many of our heroes.

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Finally an overview of our hair. Much like eyes hair has been a continuing struggle in game development across the industry.

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Our hair varies across our characters but a few factors are the same throughout. Much of our hair is created using strips of geometry that are painstakingly laid out next to each other so that you get a nice clean body of hair with some depth and fray to it. On the left you can see the individual parts of the kit including some pieces for eyebrows.

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The hair is made up from a set of maps as seen here. ID, Root, depth, and opacity. We will now go over these.

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The ID map has a different value for each hair. This allows us to control the properties of the hair very deeply based on any given value.

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The root map is colored black at the roots and white at the tips. This allows for control of reflections at the root and also for color gradients and hair effects.

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The depth map is white for the top hairs and black for the bottom with grey values ranging in between those. The material uses this map to fade hair where geometry meets as well as to create a deeper feel to the hair while using less geometry.

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Finally the opacity map. This map is best with thick sharp strands of hair.

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We have our material on the left. Again this is complex, but you only create this once. What is important is that this pipes into a Material Instance as seen on the right. There are many controllable parameters for getting a lot of variation of hair.

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Here are the parameters at work. First off showing an Ambient Occlusion Depth effect. Root Color. Tip Color. Roughness. Scattering. Brightness. Edge Mask Contrast which is a trick to help soften the silhouette. Pixel Depth Offset which blends the hair with surrounding surfaces including where hair touches the scalp. Specular (the power of the reflection)

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It is up to the artist to create hair using packages such as 3dsMax, Maya, Modo etc... The hair is built using hair tools, altered with parameters and texture maps, and then rendered or projected for final result using a 4k x 4k camera.

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All of this comes together for happy healthy heroes!

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Ok, Processing.

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There are a variety of solutions for processing maps for a character. This process is up to the developers discretion and it is their responsibilty to ensure quality of the art and delivery. Much of Paragon has been created using XNormal

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This video shows the Xnormal interface. But what is important is that Unreal Engine 4 uses Mikk-T space so you need to turn that on in any baker you use. Be sure to be using the right settings before baking.

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Also be sure to crank up the quality in any of these applications. You want the proper tangent space normal maps and high quality ambient occlusion. We render everything at about 4k and 2 or 4x anti aliasing. There are never too few maps to bake out.

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Here we see the base minimum on the right with the Normal, Base, and Ambient Occlusion, and supporting maps on the left, all of which can be used in Substance Painter!

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This is the final stop for a character modeler on Paragon. A demo subfolder is created in Unreal and the low poly and processed maps are brought in. They maintain and keep this content for future reference and also the material artist has something to start working with early on. The modeler combs over this demo model in engine to look for any errors or problems.

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Here is a material I think is really good for checking problems with a model. Multiply the Ambient Occlusion map over a grey color. Then plug in a half metalic, specular, and roughness. Then just plug the normal map in. This is perfect for finding errors in your process and model and also is great for final approvals.

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On to texturing and Materials. This is now an entire team to itself at Epic Games. This team specializes in shaping the pipeline that they use to create high fidelity work for our heroes.

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Here you can see the level that we are bringing things to in our material work. Our material work is built from the ground up using layers.

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Unreal Engine 4 uses Physically Based Rendering. Or PBR.

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Texture and material are built from the ground up using layers and masks.

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Material Layers are reused form hero to hero while the masks are simply swapped out.

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We use tools such as Substance Painter, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine 4’s robust material editor to achieve realistic physically based results.

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Our system uses real world values. Here you can see we’ve captured our courtyard at head quarters in North Carolina and we put it in Unreal. In the scene are some tools such as color palletes to help us capture proper values for a realistic look. These values can include albedo, index of refraction, and metalic. These all get slotted into our material layers system.

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Here are examples of some of those material layers piped into a “10 layer blend.” Think about this like layers and folders with masks in Photoshop. ... What controls these material layers are masks.

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Here we have those masking sets. On the right is a Material ID mask. So where it is blue might be a rubber and where it is red might be metal and green a plastic. On the left we see Scratch and Grim masks used for details such as dirt that has built up in the corners.

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Here we can see those masks at work. All of the variation in value and reflection you see here is controled using those masks. Grime masks are helping to get build up in the corners and cracks. This gives Paragon a very real and believable look. So what do we use to create these masks?

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To generate these masks our artists are using Substance Painter. This has greatly helped speed up our workflow and add a level of quality to our work. It is highly recommended to look in to this tool. Here we see one of our artists, Harrison Moore, demoing our Substance pipeline at this years Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

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Once the material artist has all the masks they need they bring it all in to Unreal. Shinbi has 12 masks across 16 material ids.

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At this point the hero is also being rigged by our cutting edge rigging team using Maya. Shinbi here has 196 bones, 33 Anim Dynamics, and 4 Morph targets

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Our team of animators bring Shinbi to life with over 80 animations for her alone.

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And finally our stunning FX team cover her in beutiful magic.

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Thank You!

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