How we made Totally Reliable Delivery Service characters

The Mission
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​Our friends at We're Five Games have been working on their game Totally Reliable Delivery Service, a hilarious physic based game with customizable characters. Our Mission was to help them achieve a great range of characters in a short period of time.
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Resources
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• MayaLT 2019
• Zbrush
• Notion.so

The outcome
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​We came up with a specific MayaLT workflow that could help us to reduce the amount of time we had to invest into making the characters. We ended up doing all character 36 variations in 2 weeks.

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Similar yet different

The guys over We're Five Games provided references for the characters they wanted to have in the game. As you can see in the pictures there is a great range of customisation choices for your character.​

​On top of this, all the variations should work for both male and female models regardless the reference gender. So we had to be aware of all the differences between genders like breast and hips.

​So we started modelling the character bodies as bases to create the clothes on top.
We used Zbrush for quick shape blockout and then MayaLT for retopology and final fixes.

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Workflow Brainstorm

​​Once we had the basic models done and rigged, we had to develop the most optimal ways to create clothes and accessories for all of them.

This project has a huge amount of work so you need to think ahead and figure out ways to shrink down production time. You never know if you'll need to add more content later on, so it's better to be prepared.​

At Polygonal Mind we like to gather around and start brainstorming possible workflows.
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Should we make them separately or together? Can we use any new tool within Maya?
​What about Substance Painter?

​After you have a few possible ways on the table, it's time to jot down the most relevant ones.
The whole process takes us around two hours, and if done correctly it will save you dozens of hours later on! Taking notes during the session is crucial, a whiteboard, pen and paper are always your best friend for these occasions.

For TRDS, we decided to make a list out of everything we saw on the concept, if you check the concept's pictures you can probably see that a lot of them wear a similar polo and pants, with small variations like long sleeves, open shirts, tank tops.

With this in mind, we started to look into things that are very similar and can be just done once and then create a variation via texture.
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To summarise, pay attention to what's similar, what's different and... list it up. At the end, we reduced the clothing models to nine different shirts and ten different pants. Instead of producing 72 clothes at once, we sorted out a lot of extra work! And made it easy to modify, add, exchange, etc.

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The magic behind UVs

​If you have done some 3D modeling, you probably know what UVs are. Just in case, they are what a 3D model looks like in 2D, this about a box when it's assembled and disassembled.
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In simple terms, it's what we use to texture 3D models.

Having a good set of UVs per model is very important because we're going to use the same 3D model with interchangeable textures, this way we're just going to make 10 pants instead of 36.
Same goes for the rest of the clothes except for the special ones.

When it comes to making perfectly interchangeable clothes with shareable UVs you can try one of these options:
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• Create the first set of clothes, then create the UVs, and use this first result as a base for the rest of the variations.
• Create the variations taking into account the vertex count and transfer the attributes from one to another. (deeper explanation in the next section)

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Usually this depends on what kind of model you are doing, in this case, we used both methods, the first one for texturing and the second one to turn models into female versions.

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Transfer Attributes from Male to Female

One of the things we did to reduce production time was to make a male character and then use it as a reference for the female one. As you may have noticed male and female bodies have a few differences that made impossible to fit clothes for both models; breasts, slender waist, among others...​

​So once we had all of the male variations we had to create their female counterparts.
To achieve this without having to create a new model for each polo we used one of the most useful tools Maya has in its arsenal:
Transfer attributes.

To use this tool you will need a source and a target mesh, they can vary widely on their topology (although is recommended to have at-least a similar edge flow). Both of the models will need to be in the same spot on the scene because of the sampling and the transfer process that occurs.
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We'll explain more about how Transfer attributes works on a future blogpost.

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Conclusion

Totally Reliable Delivery Service has been a great project to work on. It has allowed us learn new MayaLT techniques for character development in order to save time and work.
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​We can't wait to see the game come out!

Post by:

Laura @Lauretta_38

Laura Usón is a 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team.
Passionate about Warcraft, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night.