Costume Design for Video Games

An Exploration of Historical and Fantastical Skins

Sandy Appleoff Lyons

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351618168
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Costume Design for Video Games: An Exploration of Historical and Fantastical Skins explores the rich and colorful history of fashion throughout the ages. Each page goes into detail concerning the social significance of Iconic period pieces. From the real and the imagined, Costume Design for Video Games highlights the development of costumes and characters that pertain to plots, scenarios, and visionary goals, while also exploring silhouettes and the aesthetics of various eras. This survey of costume design for the video game market includes an exploration of the aesthetics of historical, fantasy, and futuristic influences.

Not only does the text help in illustrating an assortment of styles, but Sandy Appleoff Lyons also helps to facilitate creative problem-solving as it applies to costume design and the design principles applied. This is uniquely done through a reader project, which in turn builds and implements research skills and the creation of authentic designs.

Key Features:

• This book is not about replicating what already exists; it gives the reader the tools needed in order to understand the design principles and how to apply them to costumes.
• Through the comprehensive understanding of history, fashion, costumes, and cultural impacts, the readers will be able to expand their creativity and knowledge to help increase the narrative subtext and the stories of costumed figures.
• Readers are given tools for creative problem-solving to create authentic, original costumes.
• Text includes a glossary and sidebars covering materials rendering, color history, design principles, and meaning.
• Key terms and style sheets with layout training and cited historical examples help ground the reader with strong visuals.

1

Pipeline Costumes for Games

Gavin Rich

Costumes communicate a character’s intent in games. Is this character good? Is he, she, or it bad? Is this someone capable of betrayal later in the story? Is he an adventurer? Is she a soldier?

These story elements can be hinted at through subtle elements in the character’s design, and great care should be taken when designing key nonplayer characters. What about the players themselves though, and how do you make costumes that are going to evolve with the players’ growth in the game or help them display their personality in the world? Character customization has become a key component in games and has changed the way characters are thought about in production. Villagers can be randomly generated from a suite of outfits; bandits can each feel like they have their own style and their own story by mixing and matching outfits together. Making a system like this work takes some planning, and creating all of the assets can take loads of human power, but if done well, it can create an immersive world that players will love.

There are two camps when it comes to character customization: one is “GIVE THEM FULL CONTROL I WANT THEM TO GET WEIRD”, and the other is “I want these characters to always feel like they belong in the world, any combo should feel designed”. I fall into the second group so this chapter will be focusing on the second technique. That does not dismiss the first method, however; I love playing games that have the fidelity to make Marge Simpson or Christopher Walken from the same customization screen. A chapter about full customization would be much more at home in a book about programming though, not one about visual design.

Setting up a strong character customization pipeline should be thought of the same way you decide what to wear in the morning. Design is all about asking the right questions about the intent of the task. I was once told by a mentor that “every morning is a practice in character design”.

Am I going to work?

• Am I lounging around home?
• Am I going out with friends?
• Am I going to a wedding?

All of these outfits are in your closet, but you will not wear your work clothes to a wedding, and you will not wear your lounge around home sweats when you go to work. We all have intuition on what to ask; we just need to dig deep on the intent of the design. Some common questions to ask when designing character outfit ideas follow the same ideas in our own outfit choices.

What is the primary task the player performs?

• Does this outfit help with gameplay?
• Is this outfit just for aesthetics?
• What is the fantasy this outfit fulfills?
• Does this outfit represent a milestone the character has achieved?
• Does this outfit represent an area of the world?

There are many more questions to ask, but these are a great place to start.

Okay, we have our answers so we know the type of outfits we need for the character: now it is time to start designing.

Our first step is to define our limitations. What kind of technical support is on the character customization? If there is a dedicated programmer or two on the project, you will have a lot more range in what you can accomplish. I will stay simple for this to focus on a majority of use cases. Most games are going to have three or four pieces to customize. The hat, the coat, and the pants are the primary pieces to swap out. Sometimes pants and boots are separated; sometimes they go together. This setup makes it easier on the tech end but can still give some hard problems to navigate for the art team. Can we have long coats that go past the beltline? If we do, does that mean we can’t have bulky belt pieces? You come to a point where you have to make some hard decisions on what can be used in designs and what cannot be used in designs. If done right, players won’t notice that you are working around limitations. If done wrong, however, you end up with meshes that feel like they are puffy and floating over the body just in case the mesh underneath has extra pieces that stick out further than the agreed-upon distance. Instead of designing around constraints and sticking to limitations, you are forced to problem solve around worst-case scenarios, and the character starts to lose his or her believability. Get the team on board early on, and don’t stray from the constraints unless there is a technical solution that makes it viable.

Once we have our design constraints, we can start building. There are three tips that I will focus on that make life easier throughout this process:

1. The first tip is to create volumes or cages around each section of the body that is customizable. This volume represents the maximum distance a piece of the costume can extrude. Anything past this point and animations will cause pieces to clip together. Having these volumes gives the animators something to work with early in production so they can get a head start on their work.
2. The second tip is to have some sort of proxy mesh that each piece can snap to so you know the intersections will always line up. Some studios use a spline and some use a mesh, just make sure that the edges snap to that line so shirts that look tucked in always have the pants line where they appear to insert. Personally, I like to have my base human mesh broken up by color. Each colored section represents a type of clothing – pants, shirts, boots, gloves. I break the colors at polygon edges so I can snap to that line later on and I know everything will fit together.
3. The third tip is to set up a base mesh with morph targets to transfer an outfit to different body types. Sculpting and altering a mesh to each of the body types within your game will allow you to cycle through each body type using a morph target system rather than trying to alter them by hand. This process can be made into a batch system so you can just hit a button and have it automated for you. With this, I normally build to the medium body type to give the least amount of distortion when stretching and shrinking the character’s proportions.

Once these are set up, you can start the process of actually creating the clothes. While ZBrush will still be used heavily throughout the process, a new program has made a big splash in the past five years, Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer has an amazing system that allows artists to create clothing digitally, the same way they would be designed traditionally. Since the program was intended for the fashion industry, Marvelous Designer yields great results. The program has created a bridge where traditional costume designers can work in digital formats, and digital artists can create costumes that can be made in the real world.

To start, let’s make a clothing set that has three shirts and three pairs of pants. First I need to define my constraints. To design is to work within constraints; don’t just start making what you think is cool.

My game will be themed around people hiking in modern day.

My color palette will be geared towards classic outdoor wear – plaids, jeans, vests, jackets. Later I might make a set that would come from a climbing store or from a sports shop. Having these different themes allows the players to show where they have been in the game or to identify with different groups in the world.

I have decided that while a shirt can be tucked in, it is more likely to hang over the belt. With this decision, I am also limiting what can be on the belt. If anything is on the belt, it must not raise above the surface more than an inch so the shirt or jacket will not be clipped by it. Sorry hip pouch, none of you in this game.

Next, copy the section of the base mesh that represents the pants three times. I often move them to the side so I can see them all at once. Do the same for the shirts, and you should have three sets of the same copies of the body.

If there are any extra pieces I may need for my outfits, I block them out at this point. It is better to block out as much as you can, as simply as you can, early on so you have a good visual of what needs to be finished. I’m going to make one of my tops a shirt, one a jacket, and one a jacket with a vest. For the bottoms I will have jeans with sneakers, work pants with boots, and jeans with boots. I block out the meshes and change the base colors to match my palette and concepts.

This is where I would normally take things into ZBrush. I keep my base mesh and my cage in ZBrush so I can always check if my belt line is matching up and my pieces aren’t going to clip when animating. If you are working with your clothing set in the same ZBrush file, you can toggle them on and off to try different costume pairings together. Always remember to keep checking how the outfits work together, if they are lined up on the connection lines, if they are clipping the base mesh, and if they are within the distance cage.

I’m not going to go into the pipeline of building a game-ready model so let’s skip ahead.

Once we have our costume assets, we will say that the players can change the body type of their character. I will bring my base mesh into ZBrush and sculpt it into the different body types that I need. I can then reimport these models to be referenced as blend meshes. My original base mesh can reference these new shapes, and I can change its shape into these new forms.

Next, select all of your costume assets and skin or bind them to the base mesh. Now, when we change our blend shapes, we can see that the costume meshes change with the base mesh. We can automate this process, but always make sure you check your work. Sometimes this can have undesired effects on your meshes, and you will have to go in and warp sections by hand.

Using that same process, we can rig the base mesh and project its information over to our costume assets so we don’t have to rig each one individually and we know each one will be matched to the base mesh.

There you have it; we now have a clothing set for a game character that we can switch around. Experiment with different ideas that were discussed here. What if you want to add a scarf? How do gloves come into play? What if you made the boots separate? You can turn the fidelity up or down as much as you want. You can have objects change shape depending on what has been equipped in different slots. The sky’s the limit. Have fun with what you are doing and focus on making engaging characters that tell a story with their garments, and the player will embrace them.

2

Style Sheets

Sandy Appleoff Lyons

Sarah Pan

Each historical chapter we dive into will be accompanied by a terms list and examples of clothing of the era. The sketches used to exemplify the costume components were done by students at Laguna College of Art and Design. All of their sketches were done from authentic research of the period. If you are in a costume class quite possibly, the instructor is sharing actual period pieces with you. If you are going this on your own, you will need to really dig in and research period-authentic clothing to support the information provided in this book.

At the end of each historical chapter, I require my students, and urge you, to create a style sheet for that period. In the class we sketch from a model in period-authentic dress, and those sketches become the focal point of each style sheet (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Editor
• Contributors
• 1 Pipeline Costumes for Games
• 2 Style Sheets
• 3 Thoughts on Character Design
• 4 Design
• 5 Immortals and the Creative Process
• 6 Draping
• 7 Research
• 8 Translation into 3D
• 9 Egypt and Mesopotamia (3000–600 BC)
• 10 Minoan and Greek (2900–300 BC)
• 11 Etruscan and Roman (800 BC–AD 400)
• 12 Byzantine/Early Medieval (AD 300–1300)
• 13 Late Middle Ages (AD 1300–1500)
• 14 Italian Renaissance (1400–1600)
• 15 Northern Renaissance (AD 1500–1600)
• Index