Creating assets for Epic Games' Gears of War: Judgment Learn how People Can Fly used ZBrush to create character and weapon models for Epic Games' latest Gears of War title.

Has it really been almost seven years since Gears of War was first released by Epic Games? When the title first released in November of 2006 it's safe to say that nobody expected it to become one of THE defining titles for the Xbox 360 platform. It sold over three million copies in just ten weeks and kicked off a major franchise that spawned three more game titles (Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3 and most recently, Gears of War: Judgement) as well as various books, comics and even a motion picture (currently in development by New Line Cinema).

As a look back, many of you will likely remember the spectacular interview that Epic Games did for us after the release of Gears of War 2. If you haven't read it yet — or just want a refresher — we invite you to check it out, along with the massive Gears of War 3 Character Art Dump and Environment Art threads on ZBrushCentral.

While Epic Games has been the recognized wizards behind the series, they haven't worked alone! Another company — People Can Fly — handled adapting the first Gears of Wars release for the PC and has continued to be involved ever since. Today we are pleased to bring you this interview with the art team at PFC concerning their work on Gears of War: Judgement. Additionally, we got some thoughts from the Epic team concerning the collaboration.

We hope you enjoy it!

Kamil Kozlowski – Lead character artist at People Can Fly

The majority of Judgment was done here at PCF. Creative and artistic direction was handled on our side or rather initiated at PCF and from there transmitted to people working on the game at Epic. This was a collaborative effort involving many discussions, video conference calls and tons of emails.

The way we worked on Judgment was very fluid. PCF owned the single player campaign and multiplayer was a split between the two studios. The Epilogue was conceived by the Epic folks. Both studios also worked outside their main focus, collaborating with outsourcers or working on marketing materials. Many times we helped each other out in different situations.

In terms of visuals, all single player and some multiplayer environments were put together here in Warsaw. We re-used existing Gears assets, giving them new life in Judgment — often with new shaders or tweaked textures. We built our own assets as well but since the existing assets library was big enough (and also considering our short deadlines) we decided to recycle as much as possible.

PCF did the world design, all single player environment concepts, most of the character concepts, lighting, meshing and much more. However, we were definitely working side by side with the Epic team, at the same time both learning and creating Gears.

On the PCF side we have character artist Michal Przybinski, senior character artist Bartosz Bieluszko and lead character artist Kamil Kozlowski. The Epic Games side was headed up by Chris Perna.

Michal Przybinski:
Character artist at People Can Fly. Creating characters is my passion. Luckily, this also became my job.

Bartosz Bieluszko:
Senior Character artist with eight years in the game industry.

Kamil Kozlowski:
Lead character at PCF and an artist who likes to move vertices around. Has been in the game industry since 2003 and had the opportunity to work on really cool games like The Witcher, Bulletstorm and GOW Judgment.

Chris Perna:
Director of Art, Worldwide Studios. Chris has been creating art in one form or another his entire life. He has been making games now for 17 years, of which 12 have been with Epic Games. Chris works with the teams of incredibly talented art directors, artists and animators across Epic's worldwide studios to create stunning visuals for Epic's games and technology.

From a character art perspective we had many challenges along the way. Working on Gears is not something that happens every day in your professional life. It's like, let say you love the film, Blade Runner and somebody gives you a chance to work on a sequel. The pressure is huge and you constantly feel like millions of fans are watching every step you take. You don't want to make any mistakes with what they've come to love so much.

The most difficult thing for us was the style. Getting used to it was one thing; working within the style was much more difficult because of its complexity and well known identification. Everybody knows what characters in Gears look like. Even people who don't play games know Marcus Fenix! The internet is simply filled with Gears art and you just can't miss it. We had to be sure that whatever we put in to the game looks like it belongs in the Gears universe and in terms of quality meets all our expectations. We also wanted to beat GOW 3 and be a better looking game. That was our secret plan.

I have to say that guys at Epic — Kevin Lanning, Chris Wells, Mark Morgan, Mike Kime and of course Chris Perna — were a great source of Gears knowledge. They wrote documents on various topics, helping us understand their already established pipelines and style. They also did some cool characters for Judgment, working hard alongside PCF.

The amount of details and the overall quality bar was a hard thing to achieve. Not impossible, though! PCF was responsible for creating the hero of the game: Lt. Baird. We also created weapons, most of the Kilo squad (Loomis, Garron) and the main villain or rather the beast he rode — Shibboleth. We also did much smaller assets and textures. The big character customization task was completed mostly at PCF.

We actually reused assets like crazy, tweaking textures and shaders, making the world look less destroyed. Or in some cases, just recently destroyed but not yet old. We needed to remember that Judgment describes events 14 years before the trilogy. The cities, towns and other environments shouldn't look like the war has been going on forever.

So, yeah it was possible to recycle assets but we had to introduce a new post process and lighting for Judgment, giving an additional layer of warmth to all the levels. This and other tweaks allowed us to use older assets made for previous games.

In terms of the game's feeling, Judgment definitely has much more color, depth and layers of light than previous Gears titles. Moody and beautiful vistas add a lot to the new look.

Loomis is a cross between General William Sherman and Vincent Price. We created a bunch of concepts for this guy, trying to nail the distinctive look our art director was pushing for. References played a big role in the process, but getting the design done took us a lot of time and many iterations. Combining those two looks into one persona wasn't easy at all.

Loomis was also unique because his armor didn't have the "circles". (Or "speakers" as we sometimes like to call them!) He is still big and bulky, but that's the core of the Gears design and we had to stay true to that at all times.

Baird is another interesting example. We had to go back in time and imagine him much younger, living in a different environment but still having the same attitude and charisma.

As far as the process goes I was able to just grab a .ZTL file of the Kevin Baird model from GoW 3 (since we keep all source files stored) and use his head as a base for my sculpting. Erasing wrinkles was the first thing I did, making the eyes less sad looking. I had to do a sort of a CG face lift for him. His haircut was also refreshed, with new textures and slightly tuned placement of the hair planes. Thanks to that I was able to keep the style but introduce something new at the same time. This was all done in ZBrush.

His armor in terms of the design and materials had to look almost new — just gently weathered here and there. Scratches were fine but that was as far as we could go.

Judgment Baird had to use the same proportions, armor style and detailing as his predecessors — or rather, his older versions. The goal was to make him look a bit simpler and newer, without any of the handmade parts which could suggest his long involvement in battle.

As far as the quality goes we wanted to add to it, making our models better than before.

Michal adds:

References were very important to give Loomis a proper charisma. We wanted him to look cruelly tough and also sneaky. It was quite tricky, though. We thought we would just give Loomis the tough looking face of William Sherman and mix it with sneaky Vincent Price. This required a lot of re-design work and tweaking, though. We finally managed to establish a nice combination of both references, creating one solid look for Loomis.

In terms outfit design it's much different from what we know from previous GoW games. Loomis wears his parade uniform even when fighting a Locust horde.

Starting modeling and sculpting a character in ZBrush gives me better control over the silhouette and proportions. A fast method to do rough shapes is to just use Clay Buildup brushes combined with the Move brush.

Retopology helps me to build the low res cage the way that I want. The next step is exporting this cage to modo for further beveling and refining. After that's done I import everything back into ZBrush for polish and final touches where we also add small details such as scratches, fiber patterns, noise, rust or old paint. This adds tons of polygons to the model, but sculpted detail is very helpful for texturing. Baked detail is better than something created from texture.

ZBrush is present in my modeling pipeline from the beginning through the end of a production cycle.

We made some new weapons for Judgment: Booshka, Markza and Breechshot. All three are very interesting. Markza and Breechshot are actually two different versions of the same gun.

First we made the Locus version, Breechshot. After the model was complete the designers decided to create Markza as basically a UIR one-shot version of the same gun. Yeah I know that's a bit confusing. In game development you need to be prepared to think backwards if called for, being ready to fulfill different needs that might also be coming from the design department.

It depends on the job, but for me what usually works best is to start right in ZBrush and use DynaMesh to create and iterate on a rough sketch. That can later be either finalized in ZBrush or exported in to Max for further tweaking.

I think it will be best if I just describe the workflow I used for both Baird and Shibboleth.

Like I said before, working on Baird I had a previous model available but actually couldn't re-use any parts since they were made in a different style from what we needed. The face was the only element I could just take and sculpt over, bringing back Baird's younger look. I used Clay, Move and the Standard brush for organic modeling.

When I was happy with the head I had to project the result onto something we call the "universal head". To make a long story short universal head is a generic head mesh with pre-prepared UV's that we use to project our custom head onto. This keeps the vertex numbers intact, ensuring that all blend shapes for this generic head work correctly with new custom shape. Those blend shapes are later used for animation and facial expressions.

For this process, projection in ZBrush works just great. It gives nice and clean results, but if you need to tweak some vertices you can simply use Move brushes with symmetry turned on to make the necessary fixes.

What we usually also do is import our blend shapes from Max back into ZBrush onto individual layers in order to sculpt appropriate wrinkles for facial expressions. These are later baked into normal maps and exported to the shader in Unreal Engine.

The "universal head" pipeline was created by Jeremy Ernst to speed up the rigging and skinning process for all the characters.

Going back to modeling, making the armor is always a tricky part of the process. DynaMesh makes it easy, though. It allows you to arrange all the armor plates the way you like, create very complex mechanical parts quickly and re-arrange if needed. That's a huge time saver! Before ZBrush, I had to do everything in Max and it wasn't a fast process at all. ZBrush simply made our lives easier — hard surface modeling became as fluid as organic modeling.

The final step of the modeling process is the "dirt pass" which is basically a detail pass. This is where we add weathering, scratches, nuts, bolts, rust — anything that will add to the final quality and which will show up in nicely in the normal map.

The decimated high poly model is then either exported in to Max, Maya or modo in order to create a low poly mesh. Sometimes we'll do that in ZBrush as well. UV's and map projections are usually done in one of the other apps. For texturing we often reuse our temporary textures created in ZBrush, finalizing everything in Photoshop and checking in the Unreal Engine to see how it will look in-game with the proper shader applied.

After that's done and accepted the model is good to go. Even so, there is always room for improvements and we sometimes go back to something we'd called done in order to change things around or simply make something better.

Yeah, doing concepts in ZBrush is just the fastest way to design for me. Usually when we work, we have concept art provided but sometimes we need to change or re-design parts of the model. Other times we even design something from scratch. These latter cases are where we often use ZBrush.

Garron's head was sculpted from zero in ZBrush. Using this workflow I was able to propose many different heads for the art director to choose from, as well as quickly implement his feedback.

Shibolleth's head harness was also designed in ZBrush. Retopology tools were used to convert complex harness shapes in to a cleaner mesh. (We didn't have ZRemesher back then!) The entire harness was later finalized in Max and re-imported into ZBrush for implementation of the "dirt pass".

Bartosz adds:

When 2D concepts are loose and you're not sure what exactly needs to be modeled, it is good practice to spend some extra time doing more detailed concepts in ZBrush. This is especially true when you want your models to have some logical functionality. It is fast and fun using DynaMesh.

DynaMesh is great when you combine it with Slice tools, Insert brushes, ZRemesher, PolyGroups and masking. Then you have a perfect workflow for your modeling. It's good for sketching but it's also great for final modeling.

ZSketch works best for me when I'm working on muscles because it provides a very muscle-like effect when you sculpt. I use it when I have a base mesh established and need to create a muscle foundation fast.

I usually combine techniques and try to invent the best pipelines for particular situations.

Decimation and retopology are really important for us. Retopology is used to simplify and build a clean mesh on top of a ZSketch, but also we often build our low poly meshes in ZBrush using this technique as well. It works great. Since ZBrush is capable of handling millions of polygons you don't need to decimate your meshes and work in low resolution. But if you do need work in low resolution for some reason then decimation is the key.

We use decimation because in our pipeline because we bake our ambient occlusion and normal maps outside ZBrush. I'm a Max user so in order to be able to bake I have to decimate my high polygon mesh. I usually go down to 5%, which allows me to do my baking without any problems.

We also decimated and posed our models in ZBrush for this interview. We rendered turntables in ZBrush as well.

I used ZBrush for rough texturing when I was doing Garron's head. SpotLight is perfect for fast texture projections. Also, with PolyPaint and masks you can achieve cool results texturing your high polygon meshes.

Garron's rough texture was exported from ZBrush to Photoshop and finalized there. But we also use ZBrush's texturing capabilities to fix seams or add details that are difficult to implement in Photoshop.

Thanks to Surface Noise I was able to create complex-looking nets for Shibboleth. I just UV mapped base meshes that I wanted to be covered with netting and ZBrush applied a tiled net texture to achieve the desired effect.

This was before ZBrush 4R4. Now I would probably use a different approach with MicroMesh. I wished I had this feature available when I was doing Shibboleth!

All the new features! The new improvements are great. I especially love Panel Loops combined with DynaMesh modeling. Also, all the Polish features are awesome for tuning your mesh. Dynamic Brush Size is a very helpful addition. Brush Curve Mode and MicroMesh are essential parts of my pipeline now. In fact, the ability to create libraries of Curve brushes and Insert brushes lets you re-use your assets in multiple ways.

We can't say too much. But Epic is working hard as always and I'm sure people are going to like what we've prepared.

Multiple ways! PCF helps out when we are in need by organizing beer Fridays, movie nights and outdoor events. Our kitchen is filled with fresh vegetables (we decided to throw out most of the sweet stuff), drinks, yogurt and of course coffee. You can grab whatever you like as often as you need. We also do sports and PCF provides us with gym memberships.

People started running recently and are really good at it. Bartek Bieluszko is an avid runner — he recently finished the Warsaw semi-marathon. Michal loves to play football. I tend to exercise at home in my small gym, doing a lot of cross-fitness.

If you didn't have a chance to play GOW Judgment, check it out!!!! It's an awesome game and has great single and multiplayer experiences with a cool story and lots of multiplayer modes. Thanks for your time, guys!!!!!

Kevin Lanning:
Working with PCF has been a great experience for us. Seeing those guys take the gears characters and put their own personal stamp on them only added that much more richness to the gears universe. I remember seeing the first couple screens of the high poly Shibboleth Kamil was working on and knew right then that these guys were seriously digging in and having some fun.

Our internal character team created several of the playable characters alongside with PCF so it was a great feeling seeing all these characters in game polished up towards the end. It was a great line up of cohesive characters from the two studios. ZBrush has been one of the main go-to tools for us in getting our characters from concept to game.

Mark Morgan:
ZBrush was used in conjunction with Max on all of the high poly characters I modeled for Judgement. I used GoZ to transfer parts back and forth. Most of the hard surface work was done in Max and detailed further in ZBrush. How I attacked it and with what tool depended on the design requirements for the particular task. As ZBrush has added stronger hard surface tools (such as all the Planar and Trim and Clip brushes) and I became stronger utilizing them, I found myself using other applications less and less. Sometimes, none at all. PCF's modeling work was inspirational for us here at Epic. The Shibboleth model in particular had us gawking and envious that we didn't make it ourselves.

Chris Wells:
When modeling and texturing Sophia, I found ZBrush to be helpful in quickly iterating her proportions. ZBrush was also especially helpful in hair modeling as it allowed me to not only trace a quick rough model but also to use PolyGroups to minimize the clipping of hair sheets. I also found ZBrush to be helpful in making quick and subtle facial (and overall) polish whenever I had to make promotional images.

Working with PCF gave us a fresh perspective and approach to making a Gears title. They came up with new gameplay ideas, as well as a more bold application of color that made it distinct from our previous titles in the series. It was a privilege to work with the creative team at PCF, as it is a privilege and honor to work alongside my fellow Epic developers.

Mike Kime:
Mark and I split Karn up into pieces and worked on him at the same time. ZBrush allowed us to quickly create pieces and share them with each other. It was great working with PCF and seeing what they were establishing for Judgement. It helped provide inspiration for when I created characters like Alex Brand and Young Dom. Previously created key design elements were kept and worked over in ZBrush to maintain a cohesive and unique look.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to both People Can Fly and Epic Games for their efforts in putting this interview together and sharing all the great assets that they've shown off for us. We would also like to thank them for their patience, as work on bringing the interview to you was interrupted by the release of ZBrush 4R6, followed by SIGGRAPH. (Speaking of SIGGRAPH, the team from Epic gave one of the panel presentations. Look for a video of it at our Siggraph Thread on ZBC soon!)

Please share your own comments – and even questions – in this interview's ZBrushCentral discussion thread.

Thank you again!