Untold Legends Artist Reveals Character Creation

Adam McMahon, Lead Character Artist of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, shares in his blog his experience with character creation for the game. Going through several nitty-gritty details and processes, he reveals “Character creation begins in the most basic form of sketches and concepts“. The concept stage, according to him, can be considered as the most important part of character design and is the primordial element in the development of the look and feel of the game.

After establishing the look of the game comes the modeling phase. As for making the games look “next-gen”, normal maps are the main ingredient. Using several methods, like the conversion of grayscale height maps from a few years back, to software such as Zbrush, artists are then able to create phenomenal models in half the time that would normally take.

Finally bringing the characters to life are the animators, who take the hollow shells of the artists’ creations. And with a little cloth technology, you now have stunning visuals.

Adam MacMahon started his venture in the gaming industry with Sony, working on NCAA Gamebreaker. Some of his projects include NFL Gameday ’97, Shootout ’98 and MLB ’98-’02.

Adam McMahon, Lead Character Artist of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, shares in his blog his experience with character creation for the game. Going through several nitty-gritty details and processes, he reveals “Character creation begins in the most basic form of sketches and concepts“. The concept stage, according to him, can be considered as the most important part of character design and is the primordial element in the development of the look and feel of the game.

After establishing the look of the game comes the modeling phase. As for making the games look “next-gen”, normal maps are the main ingredient. Using several methods, like the conversion of grayscale height maps from a few years back, to software such as Zbrush, artists are then able to create phenomenal models in half the time that would normally take.

Finally bringing the characters to life are the animators, who take the hollow shells of the artists’ creations. And with a little cloth technology, you now have stunning visuals.

Adam MacMahon started his venture in the gaming industry with Sony, working on NCAA Gamebreaker. Some of his projects include NFL Gameday ’97, Shootout ’98 and MLB ’98-’02.