Art Direction Bootcamp: Creating a Believable Hero

[Music] all right everybody my name is Brian Horton I am the studio art director at Infinity Ward and it's great to be here today to talk about our topic which is creating a believable hero I've been in the industry for about 22 years I've been working mostly in the art field but on Tomb Raider I was able to work more in the creative side on game direction my career sort of takes me from Disney to DreamWorks to working with EA and Konami and most recently I worked on infinite warfare at infinity war but today let's talk a little bit about the topic and I'm gonna go through a couple chapters each one sort of designating a different area focus around creating your believable character the first chapter is about tapping into the universal storytelling has been going on for millennia and there are themes and there

are connections that we've made and certain people have made that connects storytelling across all genres and all cultures and I'm going to talk a lot about the hero's journey the collective unconscious archetypes themes and motivations and an actual example of a character profile so before we start in the fun stuff of creating visuals you really have to understand who your character is and Joseph Campbell's monomyth the hero's journey you may or may not have heard of this but it's extremely important to understand it before you think about building a hero's story it is not something you have to use but it's it's a tried-and-true method and the way this works is it goes the hero goes through a loop the hero is called to action by an inciting incident setting them on a new path the hero is inspired by mentors and supported by companions that share this challenge and the hero must pass a threshold that

tests the resolve beginning this transformation the next section is you're going to see the hero going through challenges that pushes them past the point of normal human endurance facing death and despair and accomplishing in the quest requires a heavy sacrifice and a revelation that will transform them and they return with a new perspective now this loop is important it's you've seen it in a lot of different movies we're going to go over that in a second but the other angle of this is archetypes and the collective unconscious a term coined by Kali young and refers to the structures of the unconscious which are shared by all human beings and according to Jung the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts and by archetypes so we're going to talk a little bit about those archetypes so you guys are familiar with Star Wars I'm sure many of you have seen Star Wars the hero's journey Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and Jung's archetypes were what George

Lucas was really excited to capture it wasn't a science fiction story to him it was a story about characters and the characters are the heart of most great hero stories and myths so you've seen probably they you know the Harry Potter franchise or Lord of the Rings or even lost on TV and each of these have specific sliced archetypes that Young's broken out across all time and all myth and and storytelling so you have your hero you have your sidekick your maiden your wise old man your villain the shapeshifter or the trickster the comic the childlike adult the adult like child and the mother figure now there's other characters that will populate your stories but these are archetypes and don't get them confused with stereotypes and that can often go into a stereotype but archetypes are important they sort of had to have a set place within a story to help your hero grow so the next

thing you want to think about is your theme and motivation so your theme should be a universal truth shared by all cultures and your hero should be driven by external and internal motivations and they will embark on this journey it's going to force change so I think about universal themes and I often go to painting I studied painting in college and I feel like the best pain in the world expressed these themes through a very strong image so love obviously is a fantastic theme injustice freedom honor liberty vengeance survival fear or guilt there's many more but if you notice all of these themes have strong emotional properties to them they're something that you do not need to translate every culture can understand them so here's a character

profile a little exercise I'm going to do with the group so in this characters profile their internal motivation is this hero's parents were killed by a criminal causing guilt and fear the external motivation the hero is driven to defend the innocent against criminal predators in the theme the hero uses fear to defeat the internal and external demons anyone raise your hands who is this course Batman Batman is one of my favorite heroes of all time and probably because I like the darker side of the hero I don't like the tried and true hero I like I like a hero with rough edges I like a hero with some humanity and fragility and there's it's there force of will that pushes them forward and Batman has no true ability he has no true superpower but he is a superhero he does amazing things even though Bruce Wayne is a regular person but he uses

the fear he uses to the things that scared him as a child and incited him to become this hero against his enemies so it's a fantastic loop that no matter which media you see Batman in this is his core this is the core of his character and what motivates him so in the next chapter we're going to talk about a property that I worked on which is Tomb Raider and a lot of our charge was to rebuild an icon Lara Croft has had an amazing run in video games she is recognizable iconic she's been seen in all kinds of media video games comic books movies but we wanted to rebuild this icon we wanted this we wanted Lara Croft to be as human as we could possibly maker so we're gonna go through a little bit of a history we're going to talk about charting this new course we were setting ourselves on the archetype inspirations for Lara Croft and ultimately this concept that we came up with our tagline

for the first Tomb Raider reboot was a survivor is born and that's sort of that's the big flip for our character is Lara as a survivor so history of Lara Croft Toby Gard designed Lara as a smart athletic archaeologist seeking relics with unimaginable power in 96 Tomb Raider was released to critical praise and millions of sales over the world and for 15 years she remained ostensibly the same she was badass she was aspirational but as she grew in the years and more and more games came out she became less and less in favor with a modern gaming audience so we wanted to chart a new course and my boss at the time at Crystal Dynamics Daryl Gallagher wanted to reimagine Lara as a young heroine and a believable hero and Noah Hughes the creative director and Rhianna Pratchett the scriptwriter created an origin story that would feature a 21 year old Lara

Croft and that was great but we needed a theme a theme to build her on something that was unique so the next section we talk about is this profile again trying to come up with a profile her external motivation and adventurous archaeologist driven to find the lost secrets of the world that's the same we didn't touch that that was the core of who Lara Croft is the internal motivation she pursues archaeology to finish her father's work and to make it her own mark ultimately that is very much the same as the classic Lara but it was the theme shipwrecked on a hostile Island hunted by murderous inhabitants Lara must struggle for survival to help her crew escape the island the survival theme really is what changed her character and everything that we did fed into that theme and this is the the new icon that we came up with for Lara Croft's I'll get more of that in a moment so archetype inspirations once again not stereotype archetypes so the descent is one of our

team's favorite horror film films it was really an amazing study about these women who had these internal and external demons to fight and their willingness and ability to dig deep and survive and there was a lot of visual things about them too that were really compelling and that climbing axe was a very iconic element of the film and something that we really gravitated to but we also looked at loss we're also huge fans of that show at the time and Evangeline Lilly played Kate and Kate was a complex hero she's officially at the maiden in the archetype but she is a sensibly a hero and she was relatable she was emotional she had this emotional depth but she also had dark secrets so she wasn't just a cookie cutter character she actually had complexity and the more you got to know her the more of those secrets sort of started to unfold so I'm gonna do a quick story overview I'm gonna get through this quickly if you haven't played Tomb Raider

I apologize big spoilers you're gonna we're gonna go through this whole thing come on people was like a long time ago I hope you've at least know the core story so Elora begins her archaeologist expedition with a thirst for adventure looking for the lost city of Yama time and we created a mentor character for for this story and this is Conrad Roth and he sort of represents what you would what we imagined a typical tomb raider might be he actually has the dual pistols he has the experience he has done a ton of treasure hunting and he serves as a mentor for Lara Croft and then we came up with a concept of a survivor is born and this is where the theme really kicks in so when the endurance is scuttled by a storm Lara is left alone to fend for herself on this hostile Island against hostile inhabitants and this opening scene was sort of a metaphor for her rebirth she was actually bound in to set in a sack and had to burn herself to get down and she had this terrible event very painful birth and rebirth of this

character and that was an important metaphor for us is for three crafting who she was so there was a vulnerability to Lara Croft and that was new because when we think of Lara Croft at least in a classic sense she was almost invulnerable she could backflip her way out of any problem user dual pistols and take you know take names and and do the business there was she almost expressed no fear and we needed to reset we need to make her experience fear so she had an arc to get to a place where she would be this confident hero and one of those things we did is we stripped away those dual pistols that was an iconic part of her character and we completely removed them for this game and what we did is we replaced them with new tools so the fire was the first tool that she got and she used that tool to escape the den and then she eventually discovered the bow and the bow is also another iconic new element and both of these tools reinforced our theme of survival so in that hero's journey she had across a

threshold she had to go to a place where she could not come back from and that really came down to the point where she had to kill a person for the first time so Lara Croft up until this point in our fiction has never killed a person and this was an important part of her arc as she passed this threshold and that really set her on her hero's journey her best friend Samantha was captured by Anitha asur villain and this is part of a trope of the story but this is the captured maiden part of the loop and she has to rescue Sam before they can leave this island now the mentors challenge so this is where a mentor becomes really important because not only the early there as an aspirational figure but they're there to give you challenges and the thing that was great about this was we use that not only narrative Lee but we use it in game play so each tool that Lara got whether it be the torch which was fire or the bow which gave her long long gave of shooting ability she eventually got this axe from her mentor Conrad Roth and his

axe represented not only a symbol of his trust but it was also an important tool for her to scale the mountain and eventually reach her first challenge so she had to face this challenge of the hostile Island alone Conrad Roth Roth had been injured and she had to send this SOS and the fate of her crew was in her hands so this was an important thing to see to see her start to to embrace what it means to be a hero and to grow as a character ultimately she gets to that challenge she she she finishes the mentors challenge she gets out the SOS there's a moment of jubilation about a relief because we've been so dark we the characters had so much hardship that we gave him a little beacon of hope and we did everything not only in her character arc to feel that confidence but also in the way we set the world we really brought in light and color and we wanted that moment to feel celebrated but this was a short-lived victory this plane that she got that she had called in was

taken down by a supernatural threat once again we're escalating the threats and were forcing Laura to understand that it's not going to be an easy thing for her to finish her journey she's going to go through a series of these trials and tribulations ever escalating ever getting to the point where she's driven to the edge of human endurance but she is also driven to save her companions and she pushes through she's ultimately captured and gets to a point where she is at the lowest part of of the story but what she really understanding what it means to be a survivor we start to see a physical transformation in her character and then she's more steel we're starting to see classic elements of lara croft come through she's taking the fight to the enemy she's no longer waiting to be attacked she's taking it to them and she's being proactive so this is how we start to see that evolution in her character and which which makes her interesting so this is

the most important lesson for her in her arc is her mentors death this is classic in multiple stories but it puts her in a situation where she learns an important lesson that she hopes to get everyone off the island alive and that's almost a naive thought or feeling because in this journey something has to be sacrificed she's gonna lose friends and she has to come to turns terms with those losses so we've added another archetype the turncoat in here one of our own crew actually turns Samantha over to the enemy and Laura kills this enemy using the weapons of her slain mentor and we give the the players a glimpse of her potential future we give her that classic silhouette that Lara Croft with the dual pistols but she's not there yet but this is this is a glimpse of her future and her destiny she's gonna face one last supernatural threat taking her

out and she will save her friend but they've both been scarred by this adventure they escaped the island with not their full crew and Lara feels the guilt of this loss and her thirst for adventure will transform more into a passion to ever uncover the world's secrets because they are dangerous and he/she needs to understand them she leaves the island with more questions than answers so that was just a little bit of a of a loop of how we eventually got there with Lara Croft but let's click back we have to think about how he actually brought her to life so that's a story that's the context that's the rapper that we're going to put this hero into but we had to design her we had to come up with the visuals how far we were going to push away from what she was to where she was going to be for this new incarnation so we wanted to design a human hero and we had to do a ton of iteration to get to that point and we pushed further in the

realm of realism by introducing models and wardrobe and things that we've never seen in the tumor head franchise before to bring her one more step to realism now this title of the story of this presentation is creating a believable hero these these themes these ideas don't necessarily have to feed into a realistic game it just so happens that to Mayor was going for a realistic aesthetic but the Incredibles has as a very stylized movie has a lot of these same principles and in it so if you have a stylized game you're working on a lot of these principles will also work so when we design this hero it comes down to people and I can't express enough how important Bren Adams was to this whole process he was the assistant art director on two he was my right-hand man and ultimately a lot of the visuals that you see for Lara Croft come from him and I was just very fortunate to work with him and cam you who is a longtime modeler of Lara Croft going back all the way to legend so having a group of people that you can

trust that can push each other that's a really important thing when you're talking about a task like this you can do it on your own but it's great have collaborators and we started with silhouettes and what you're gonna see in these early silhouettes is they look very familiar to an older Lara Croft or to that classic rendition of Lara Croft Brendan was just pushing the idea of how far we wanted to go with her character so you have your signature elements you have your ponytail you have the M shaped lips you have the dual pistols and you have the silhouette which looks very familiar then we started to iterate we started to think how could we continue pushing it we caught cut off her hair at one point hey can we lose the ponytail can we give her a child companion could we even give her a monkey I'm not kidding you that was actually in there at one point she was gonna have a monkey it's crazy but it was really funny and I had to put in the PowerPoint so we kept going we kept pushing and the acts the descent film came into into focus for us we brought the acts into the silhouette

and that was looking interesting we were looking at ideas of like maybe she would break her bones let's how do we express survival and we kept thinking about survival survival and then we realized that would really suck for gameplay to have her broken having broken bones so we didn't do that but we did want to keep pushing and ultimately we came down to the ideas of what if she was just progressing through the game and it wasn't affecting her control but you would see as she went through the the signs of the wear and tear of the island and the adventures would start to progress on her now this wasn't the final incarnation but it was a really interesting exercise at how you think about progression from the beginning to end and ultimately we came to our final design and we came up with what what I believe is a new silhouette you can take this down to just black and white which I probably should have done for the PowerPoint but I forgot to do it where you can see Laura with the two the two pistols and Laura with the bow on her back and the axe in one hand and we created a

new silhouette a new icon for Lara Croft and as we kept iterating we did head turns we talked about gear and how the gear would would add to the character and even little small details like this little necklace it was something we designed we didn't have a story for it and then the writers saw that necklace and said oh it's really cool and they wrote a whole backstory for the necklace about it was her first archaeological discovery and sort of was that her inciting incident to to fall in love with archaeology so she wears that and that's an important part of her character it helped define who she is but the bow and this is a rise of the Tomb Raider concept so this is going to be mixing matching some of the old stuff and the new stuff but every piece of gear that we we put on her body we wanted to make sure told a story and the axe as I talked about was an important one not only was an important tool but it was something her mentor gave her now for for the companions we ended up with a very large secondary cast larger than

we actually probably should have had but we were filling the archetype roles and each one of them served a function the mentor the maiden the sidekick the turncoat the comic the childlike adult the adult like child and the mother figure all of them are represented I think we did a really bad job at describing these characters and they became stereotypes they weren't the best expression of what we hoped and aspired to do but they were all there so you shoot for the stars sometimes you pick a lane you go we want to do all this stuff and then we realized we weren't giving them them enough screentime there wasn't enough opportunity for you to fall in love with them and they fell into stereotype so it's an important thing to know that even though you might have have the best intentions and followed the book execution is still everything when it comes to realizing your characters but what we think we got right were at least two of them in this crew which was the mentor Roth and and Lara and we think we did a pretty good job describing those two characters when it came to the enemies we also had we struggled a lot

with who are these enemies why are they important to Laura what do they do to challenge her and what we realized is to make them as compelling they had to be survivors of the island as well they were also shipwrecked on these on this island and they became indoctrinated into this cult and one of my favorite pieces of storytelling that we did in the game was we got to see how the Solari soldiers were indoctrinated they were put into this pit of despair and forced to survive a brutal existence and it almost drove them mad and if they survived that that terrible pit of despair that they would be good enough to fight in Mathias his army and be willing to do anything so if you're fan of The Walking Dead right now that is essentially what you're seeing with the enemy types is that negan will beat down these these people until they just broken and shattered and then who are they they're negan they're all negan and that's before we knew about that but man that's I wish I would have had that at

the time because that's exactly what we wanted to try to do with the Solari was to make that human beings that are shattered and rebuilt under this malevolent leader and then when it came to the Oni the supernatural enemy we wanted to make them we didn't want any visible signs of magic we really pushed away like we did a lot of experimentation with how much magic would be in the game and we said man every time we add it it feels like it's it just broke the bubble it we we lost we lost that that cohesiveness so the Oni were essentially samurais but immortal and what we did is we just used their behaviors we made them more feral we made them less disciplined as a way to express their immortality so it was this contrast of samurai looking characters that acted and behaved a lot like animals so that was our way to express their their supernatural qualities at the end we just at the very end we talked about Himiko and the Queen

and that's where we get the most supernatural but we really protect that until the very end but ultimately the most important character next to Lara Croft is the environment and I cannot express this enough when you're designing your hero you have to think about the environment that they're in everything that Lara does everything your hero will do should be the environment itself should be a challenge or a complement to something you're trying to express in theirs in their story arc and I think this is probably the second most successful character we created in the game was the environment Yamatai itself had a life to it it had this dynamic whether it had hostility it was aesthetically just it had darkness to it and it would progress it wasn't just one look all the way through we went through different weather states we went through different architecture styles but ultimately what we came to was an environment that we felt we called the second most important character in the game and that was all that was Lara's best enemy in Tomb Raider ok so the next section we had to

cast Lara Croft we had to bring an actor into our into the fold that was going to embody what is a young Lara Croft look and act like and we went through an exhaustive list of of actors and we had Camilla come in and she was sort of reading for us it's almost like a han Solo thing where Han Solo was being was Harrison Ford was not originally considered for the role and there was this person that you know Harrison was just breeding against other people like well what about Harrison Ford Camilla was kind of like that where she was a writ came in very early and we were looking at other candidates and that ultimately came back to Camilla because she had this truth and honesty and simplicity about her performance that we really loved and we didn't want her to feel like a superhero or a confident person in the beginning and we wanted her to get there so Camilla was a very young actress and she's now done many things you know Grey's Anatomy and and a

number of other things but at the time she was completely unknown so we were very fortunate to cast Camilla and bring life to the character and then for the visualization we we cast a number of models this is across two games to serve as voice our as face and body likeness at least reference because we wanted Lara Croft to still be unique there was not one actor out there that was going to fill fulfill our goals for Lara so she was a composite and we had Megan the that she served as the base morphology of the face we had four rise of the Tomb Raider we did even more work towards wardrobe and every single garment that Lara wore was scanned and I feel like that was a really important part of pushing what I call clothes not costumes for believability I think it's extremely important that your characters don't feel like they're wearing a costume and that's something that you'll see in films when they translate from a comic

book into a film if those things become more practical you'll see that iconic elements but ultimately they they feel more like like a like a garment that could be made so we actually bought clothes off the rack augmented them but they serve as a foundation to create what I believe is something that looks much more authentic there's the scan for the head for Megan facial expression references Moore Moore's can work for the torso the jacket the pants now this is an important slide because I had this idea I wasn't sure if we could pull it off but I really wanted to see the wrinkles and her pants articulate as she moved and we've seen wrinkle maps before in games but I really wanted to push beyond just wrinkle maps I wanted to see Belen shape changes plus wrinkle maps and while I don't think we got 100% there these scans per provided a really interesting reference point for us as you can see the difference between the folds from one leg to the other

that's a drastic difference as they're articulating so we did bring this we brought new technology into the inter rise of the Tomb Raider to try to bring this articulation and fold logic dynamic fold logic into the game this was the scanned model so how the scan and the head model was fused and here's that example of the deformation in the wrinkle maps and how they worked this was this is a kind of a techy slide even though this presentation is more about theory it was just a small detail that that the team was passionate about and it's and I think what happens when you're making these games is it's the small stuff sometimes that people love so that was just one thing we brought that into the body where you could see different wrinkles from her torso actually twists and even her arms head must muscle deformation and here's some of the gay models from rise of the Tomb Raider using the in-game renderer and it was exciting for us because you know we

had established a really interesting game in the first one and to continue to build on it was it was a joy because we had figured out a lot of the hard stuff and the rest of it was like well how would we you know how would you have different outfits for Lara Croft and what would they look like and how do you make sure that it doesn't look like costumes and it does feel like clothes so we were able to get from the first one she wore a tank top the whole time we really got to see her evolve and be prepared going into an expedition and that was a big difference in in how we approached the sequel and then you're starting to see distress this was another really important thing for believability and grounding the character to the world so we had our our shaders and this isn't a new technology but it's something we were really committed to is every time that Laura goes into a new environment she'll have these these dynamic shaders that will reflect the environment so if it starts to snow you'll see snow accumulation it's raining the rain will make the clothes wet muddy bloody etc so here's an example of Laura in distress state

where she has the blood and mud and dirt and scratches on her and to see these things come in and out based on her damage it was just a really cool new approach to to reflect the the game that you the player were playing that your character felt connected to to your actions even small stuff like fernell shader on the clothes that little peach fuzzy feel that close get that separate them from the skin which has subsurface scattering these aren't new technologies per se but I just bring them up because you have to sort of get into a bare minimum of tech when you're talking about building a realistic game where these features add up to creating a more believable looking realistic character once again you don't have to if you're not making a realistic game you don't need all of these things but even the Incredibles had subsurface scattering and Fornell shaders and all the stuff that I'm talking about to try to take their cartoony silhouettes into something that feels more real and then

this is something an innovation that we Don for the PC version of Tomb Raider and we brought in to rise of the Tomb Raider which was spline based hair one of the biggest iconic elements of lara croft is her hair and weave we really feel like we've struck you know a really important thing in the games industry is to continue to push the technology to see more secondary motion and more believable motion happen on characters and the spline based hair might not be for every game but for Tomb Raider we were willing to pay the expense to see a much more articulate physics simulation and physical rendering so every single condition that you see the spline hair is reactive to win and to to wetness you'll see all those conditions change because we were able to build such a robust system for the hair and for the game model itself you know we could go into the details I mean ultimately I don't think Lara is a realistic or photo realistic character she's we're trying to strive for believability so there is an abstraction

even though we're getting more and more real that we're taking she's not quite to the point where you could take a photograph of someone and that's Lara Croft so that was one of the big challenges for the character team on the game was was riding the line of iconography and realism and this is one of the in-game cinematics we're really stoked to continue pushing real-time cinematics in Tomb Raider because it allowed your choices to be reflected on the model so if you ever play a Tomb Raider or rise of the Tomb Raider and you you change your outfit every single one of those cinematics is going to reflect your outfit choice and I know it's another small detail but it really makes you feel connected to that character it makes you feel like that that's your version of Lara Croft that's who you're playing and we were able to get a lot of really nice features in here like soft shadows and you know really bring all the work that the character team did to bring the fidelity of those characters forward was was showcased in these cinematics and these are some of the production renders that we did for for

Tomb Raider across the two games and each one has a similar theme right they all suggest survival but once again her her attitudes is the reason I put these in across two games you're gonna see Lara's confidence change so if you look at the early renderings there's a lot more of her the world that is attacking her and she's she's being attacked and it's sort of almost holding herself and as she goes for she's now hunting the enemy she's she's confidently striding forward she's embracing the the darkness she's going into the tomb she's just not reacting to it so all of these pieces of key art were helping us tell a story of her evolution as a character okay this is the most important chapter and it's the one I have the least amount of slides on because it's animation it's not something I can look at and still pictures but I can't say enough about how important animation is to your character it's everything in fact

it's way more important than all the other stuff I just talked about breathing life into your character always comes from motion and that can come from the actors you choose to do motion capture or your keyframe animators but the reason I had this slide up here of these people is because the animators are the ones that are the heroes they're their heroes they bring these heroes to life each one of these animators was Lara Croft because they worked on her every day and they brought the subtlety and nuance and emotion to what is essentially I call a puppet because you can have the most beautiful puppet in the world and if it doesn't move right you won't care about it so the emotion of the game comes from these people right here and I have a small movie well you know what I'm gonna just skip the movie I just want to be able to give you guys some more time to ask some questions if you have them I'm gonna go through us a bit of a summary so the first thing you should think about is

who your character is make us come up with a theme that has a universal truth to it shared by all cultures your hero should be driven by internal and external motivations they should embark on a journey that forces them to change and you should build a profile for your hero that is based on these themes and motivations something that you can always come back to and say hey would they do that does that make sense for this character and design a supporting cast of characters that will complement or challenge your hero's goals this is another important thing and something that all of us are striving to get better at is how can you support how can you make each supporting cast member as important and vital and well-rounded as your hero and for the design for the visual design your hero should be iconic start with a silhouette they should be recognizable without any internal detail and design from the general which is the

broad silhouette to the very specific all the way down to that necklace so you have to think about your your characters your designing them through through those different lenses try to cast an actor even if you're not going to work with an actor imagine an actor that would give your your character a soul and then and then use that as inspiration for how they perform it and how they work and especially you know in our case how they would look wardrobe should be practical this is my opinion some people don't believe in this I just believe that the best heroes have the most practical garments so think about clothes not costumes think about even in the most stylized games or like a character like Batman every single thing on Batman's outfit has a serves a function even to the point of his silhouette it invokes fear so that is why he can look a little outrageous because he is trying to instill fear in an enemy that generally doesn't isn't afraid of anything and every detail

tells a story every single thing you do to your character is going to tell the viewer what they should think about that character so make sure you appoint your appear your hero with props and reinforce those themes that you've talked about all the way at the profile into into those details and character execution if you're making a realistic character try to cast some models that match your design purchase or create clothes for your model to achieve maximum realism once again if you're going for realism photogrametry is is an amazing process to be able to capture all this detail and while we're living in games now are really embracing physically correct and you can get all the great detail off of those it from that photogrammetry information that it will help make your character more physically correct you want to capture the faces and close with extreme poses in mind so not only what they look like in the base but what do they look like in motion and then

hopefully your artist can infuse some of that detail into the into the character when they move and prepare your asset with dynamic distress now once again this is something this is a style choice thing but for every game I'll ever work on in the future I love to see progression and that I'd love to see the character fit the world wherever they might be whether they're covered in snow or ash or or blood you know those things if they're dynamic they're that much more impactful and connect the character to the world in action so if you think about what your world is doing your character should reflect those things on there on there on the model itself and performance the most important thing is bring your character light for the motion style that reinforces your theme performance capture is a great technology that you can capture them even the most subtle performances from from your actor and bring them and infuse them into your into your model with blend shapes and wrinkle maps so

this is getting a little bit more techie but I absolutely love the new tech that we're able to embrace to bring subtlety to our characters think about contextual animations things where your character in the world are related one of the behaviors that we brought to Lara Croft is when she's cold every time she goes near a fire you'll see her rubber hams and warmer hands you'll see when she's also cold and not near a source like that she'll shiver when she's in a tight claustrophobic space she'll put her hand up on the wall to recognize it into crouch down so really think about those contextual animations that make your character connect to the world that they're in and think about secondary animation you know the primary animation the primary locomotion is fantastic but it's those secondary animations that really bring some life into what are essentially cycles and if their physics driven you're going to see your cycles change based on whatever or conditions you might have in the world and reflect your characters growth

through performance as your story progresses think about new behaviors or improvements to your character to continue to tell the story of their growth alright questions comments that's all I got if no one has questions I'll play that video all right gonna play that video okay go ahead so you knew you were making lara croft do you have recommendations for teams that are coming up with an original character especially if they're trying to make something that's original not cookie cutter of all the other heroic game dirt meals ultimately when you're when you're making a hero and you don't want to follow into the tropes and traps of

classic archetypes just know that having a structure underneath you even if you're doing something abstract like your character is a blob of goo as long as you're thinking about their character and how they change and how they interact with the world that they're in you can really do some amazing things but it's really understanding some of those those core principles that can help you at least construct a framework to build any new character so all I had you know recommend is don't don't think of these constructs as rules that you have to follow just think of them as information that you can always come back to if you're having a hard time finding what the center X or interest for your character might be in some games you need to make a characters that is completely out of the game itself the environment and it's it contracts contrast with the entire game and world and at the same time you need it to fit

into what the game is aiming for so have you had any experience with that including clothes colors and animations yeah absolutely I mean sometimes you want your character to deliberately stand out some of my favorite games have a character who's in is made of silhouette or like a made of a shadow and they're only visible there are invisible character and they only seem to from their shadow or a character that's made of light and they they stand out in front of in a dark world so your character doesn't always have to blend in or be a part of that world but they should have an effect on that world so whatever your character does and whatever their goal might be whether it's to be to be very unique and and separate you know even stylistically separate just make sure that they are there they're supporting a goal that the game has right that that is ultimately what you're trying to do with your character at all times is is make it reflect the the gameplay intentions that that the game has itself hi um could you

talk a little bit about the deaths animation in Tomb Raider because those are probably one of the best things that we remember about the game why do you need to make them so brutal so it's a great question we got that a lot yes the question was why did you make the death animation so brutal and tomb raider and there's a good answer for that one we came back to what what is the core theme of of our game and it was survival and to us you can't have actions without consequences so if I'm on an interactive sequence and I am and my and my characters a life depends on my actions and if I don't perform those actions correctly there has to be a consequence that makes me go ah I better not do that again I better do that better for some people are like oh I got to see

that again you know I mean Conan O'Brien's yeah clueless gamer is sort of a meme right it's like it was became that thing where is because he was so bad at video games that he kept dying over and over and over again and it looked a little masochistic but the hope is is you don't die like that so often and that they really are a source of feedback for the treacherous situations that you're in so as the character progressed like in rise of the Tomb Raider we still had our brutal deaths but there weren't as many and they weren't as frequent and that wasn't because we're trying to be more PC we were really trying to say that the character is grown and and that that her competence is improved and that that is why the tone shifted across the games thank you mm-hmm yeah hey Brian gray hawk so my question was how much of the story in Tomb Raider was known upfront relative to the design of the character

and how much did changes to the story that iteration process affect either Laura or any of the other supporting characters in Tomb Raider or rise of the Tomb Raider yeah so the question was how much of the story was written before we started the character and how much of the character came first and the story came later and I can tell you that the goals were right away like when we were designing the character all those arc that the ideas and archetypes and survival the themes that was first so we really couldn't design the character without having that now when it came to that story that I went through that whole loop of how Lara went through the hero's journey that came much later but if you have that story ahead of time it's even more powerful for your artists because they can imbue the character with key ingredients throughout that story that are going to make them that much more rich so the aspiration is if you can you get your writers and your game designers together early enough to talk about the arc and to talk about where your character is going to go

that's going to inform the character artists that design them so that would be the hope but ultimately what we had was the character first and then as new events happen to her we started to add ingredients to her character so there was a scene when she got impaled by when she was when she fell down she got impaled by a piece of rebar and we added that as a permanent part of a scar in her character or when she was hitting it in the face with Vlad bhaiyya by a gun we brought in to rise of the Tomb Raider that little scar went into the next game so we tried to build and accumulate these experiences on the character and see as her you know her wardrobe or her costume would reflect all the trauma that that was just those were things that we brought into the character as as the story was was being written I I have a question about like you talked about like building the characters in the third-person perspective but look when you develop like first-person shooter

yeah like I think most people like project themselves to the character so is is there like some approach to develop and making characters yeah I think I think there's two different approaches like for for infinite warfare we decided to make Reyes a real character that had a voice and that we would seem in cinematics and cutscenes so we were playing a character just like a third-person action-adventure game but there are games like half-life and half-life 2 one of my favorite games where you are the characters a cipher right that they don't have a personality because you want to transport your personality into them now that's really cool I think there's something really important about that but if you want to have your character go on an arc it's all then about the reflection of that arc has to come from your support cast and from the world itself so the lift is now on the environment artists the lift is on the supporting cast to help reflect back what my actions did so this is a constant battle we have as game developers is when we want to tell a

story which has a prescribed beginning and end and that conflicts with a goal that a player might have you have what we call cognitive dissonance and it's something that we dealt with a lot like hey I wouldn't have felt that way if I shot that person I would have felt happy about it not sad about it so one of our challenges as game developers is how do we ensure that we have parity with what the characters feeling and what the what the audience member might be feeling and and that's why first-person shooters that let you be a cypher let that first person character not have a personality that's probably the cleanest and easiest way to do that but I challenge all of us to think about telling stories completely all the way through and retaining that connection with the character and the way the player feels and I know it's something that I've got friends over here from Naughty Dog it's something I'm sure you guys talked about a lot and I work with Taylor and Jacob and they caught they worked on The Last of Us since one of my favorite games of

all time and I remember telling hey my only beef with that game was at the end I wouldn't have made the same decisions Joel Joel made but what they told me was really compelling they said well that wasn't your story that was a Joel story and as long as you're with him along the line you'll understand and appreciate that decision that he made for himself so those are the kind of challenges we have as designers and as artists is to try our best to tell compelling emotional stories yet embrace the agency that is in video games thank you oh thank you hi um could you talk more about designing female protagonists like what are the challenges and what are the things you have to keep in mind yeah when it comes to female protagonists is I don't think that's important I'm gonna say that one more time it's not important the hero is the hero now there are is there a different am I saying is there a difference between a man and a woman absolutely but you just build that into part of who they are as

a character so the only reason I can say that there's a problem with it right now is cuz people still obsess about it as a thing right being a female oh my gosh I'm a I'm a dude and I feel really uncomfortable playing as a female I don't know how that makes me feel that that can exist and some people have issues with that but really what we're trying to get to is a place is that your character is your character they can be female and they can be an alien they can be a man they can be a lot a piece of slime they can be whatever you want but ultimately does their motivations ring true does the characters actions reflect their motivations are they compelling are they interesting do they have someplace to go as long as you have all of those things and you could just you could take the reason that this presentation was so much more about the structure of your hero and not so much about the choices you make is because once you have that right you can really design pretty much anything and your

audience is going to be along the ride with you at least that's my belief mm-hmm all right that's all I got thank you guys so much for coming appreciate it