Loosely grouped together under the heading of “Hero Characters”, these guys are perfect to be used as hero character assets in a range of games. Consisting of five high quality character assets, the set includes:
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Biker gang member
Sexy female vampire
Noble goat-man guard
Grizzled pirate veteran
Sturdy Orc chieftan
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All are presented using high quality, game ready topology, textures and materials, as well as being bound and retargeted to Epic’s common humanoid skeleton so any suitable animations should be easily useable on them. Perfect for use in any situation!
All characters come in around 15k polygons and use 2048x2048 head and body textures.
Hopefully we’re allowed to add further updates to content pack releases (v1.1 etc) - if so plans to add physics bones/ cloth, LODs, implement bones for mouth/ eyes etc. and add the weapons along with appropriate sockets where applicable are afoot!
One bit of feedback - it’s kind of an odd assortment of characters to package together. Assuming you’re selling them, you might have better luck getting salesif you break them into related groups. It seems unlikely that somebody would need, for example, a biker dudeand a pirate in the same project.
The character pack is meant to be a set of “Hero Characters” - basically the main, player controllable character in a game. These characters typically have the highest polycount, textures resolution and material complexity devoted to them, as they typically are on screen the most and have most attention to detail paid to them. Because there’s normally only one hero/ player character per game, the thematic range of characters shouldn’t really be a downside. In my talks with Epic they picked the “Hero Character Pack - 5 main hero characters” idea over the “Main Character and 4 NPC/ Enemies” idea - if this set does well I’ll certainly add a thematically cohesive set with a main character and 4 enemies/ NPCs though
You’re right though - I can think of very few games when a Pirate and Biker would both be playable characters Biker and a female vamp though? Goat Guardsman and Troll Warlord? Maybe
The ballpark specs are in the first post - the characters come in at around 15k each, with a 2048x2048 texture set for each head and body. I’ll add more detailed tech specs for each character though. When you see that the Dragon in Infinity Blade 3 had “…four times the polycount of any console character we’ve ever done in Gears of War” differences between mobile and other hardware formats aren’t really applicable - what really makes most difference is the situation the characters are used in.
Hopefully v1.1 will add lower LODs for each character with polycounts more applicable to older hardware/ less character intensive games. The materials they use are all pretty standard and basic, so the lower LODS, coupled with reduced texture sizes would allow them to be used in almost any sitation.
I hope that didn’t come across as a criticism. I really like the models, I was just curious about the thought process behind bundling 5 very different characters together.
No not at all! If you asked the question, you can be sure that other people were thinking the same thing
In a tired haze after an extended period of Editor wrangling, I forgot to add a bunch of details to the description of my submission, so the Trello card doesn’t give a lot of the answers that you were looking for. Hopefully my response cleared up a few of the questions that you…and others have!
I’ll put up the tech specs of each character, and update the first post later on tonight.
@Fat_Cap - Any chance we could get the Maya files for these? Exporting from UE4 to FBX adds extra nodes which ends up making the skeleton incompatible when re-importing. I’d like to add some bones to the mouth, as well as blend shapes, for lip syncing, but with the import problem it’s pretty difficult. I also kind of need to remove the chest from the pirate’s back, which isn’t a big deal by itself, but the way it messes with the skeleton hierarchy makes it a pain to get back into the engine.
Also, it seems like you can’t have the Metallic property on a material which is set for subsurface - this ends up messing up the look of the vampire chick’s clothing if you set up the skin for subsurface scattering. I’m not good enough at UE4 materials to figure out how to fix it (it ends up making all of the clothing look like plastic/rubber). Any chance we could get the skin separated into another material, or tips on how to set that up properly? The SSS makes these characters look even more top notch.
Thanks
Edit: I assume to fix the skin vs other materials issue and still use SSS, it would probably have to have a Layered Material, with the skin being on a separate layer.
I’ve been meaning to go back and tweak these characters for while, but haven’t had the opportunity to do so yet. Once E3 is out the way and things calm down a bit timewise, I’ll hopefully get a chance!
Setting the SSS stuff up properly (these were built with a really early version of the skin material) should be pretty painless - the skin is a separate mat from the clothing where they fell along polygon boundaries - I’ll definitely add the polies to break up all elements into discreet skin or clothing chunks, with their respective materials applied for the next update. They all need proper translucency maps/ SSS strength masks baking for them to utilise the shader correctly too. I can definitely sort it out to have a variant of the pirate with and without the chest on his back too. A better hair material setup wouldn’t go amiss on these guys too
The source assets are actually 3DS Max files and skinned to it’s Biped skeleton so not much use in Maya. I’d finished the pack before Epic’s Maya Animation Toolset was released (would have saved me a tonne of pain I’m sure!). I’d love to provide the source assets to allow modifications, but, as you can imagine I’m reticent to give source files away as I’d lose all real ownership of them once they’re “out in the wild”. I think anymore work that is done on them will have to have me (or hopefully get somebody to help me with this) set the characters up using the Maya Animation Toolset and the new Epic default skeleton to allow for the fullest of future proofing and flexibility - including adding facial animation stuff and morph targets - anyone that wanted to help with this should definitely fire a PM my way as rigging and skinning definitely isn’t my favourite task!
The pirate was really good for this - the face being separate makes it already work. I think the vampire girl is the one I had issues with - it was a little too hard for me to try and mask between the small areas where she has cloth and skin mixed in.
I understand perfectly - it’s just a shame that it’s functionally impossible to modify the characters by exporting from UE4. I don’t actually need the source file, just a source file that can be successfully re-exported back into UE4.
Right now on export it adds a top level node/bone named the same thing as the mesh, adds all the (separated) geometry pieces as bones etc. I can’t actually figure out any way to fix this, as there seemingly isn’t a way to unparent objects from a frivolous node in Maya. The top level node prevents it from even being reimported, but that can be fixed by renaming it. Unfortunately it still results in a skeleton that’s incompatible with the normal ones, and also has hundreds of frivolous bones (the ones it makes based on the poly surface pieces).
I plan to get the mouth rigged up at the very least, though for now I’ll be skipping morph targets since it’s just too hard for me as a non-artist. I’d love to share such a mouth rig back to you, the problem being that the FBX that’s exported is all cluttered up in the fashion I mentioned above.
Edit: In any case, I totally understand the issues with sending out source files - there’s not a good way to distribute them for one thing. Not sure what the answer here is. I’ll try bringing in the exported FBX to Max instead and see if I can get more mileage out of it that way. If it comes down to it, and you’re interested Fat_Cap, I’d be perfectly willing to just contract you on for the stuff I need specifically, and we can work out a license that allows you to just update your pack with whatever work you do. Really it’d be useful stuff for the pack anyway as you noted. In that fashion we could also avoid the issue of source files (you could send me updated UE4 asset files instead).
Biker and a female vamp though? Goat Guardsman and Troll Warlord? Maybe 