A look into the Character Art Pipeline
A look into the Character Art Pipeline

A look into the Character Art Pipeline

Welcome to the latest release in a series of video tutorials that were previously only available to CRYENGINE Insider subscribers. Today’s release covers a full character art pipeline using the very same techniques we use in our studio.

This comprehensive webinar shows you a full character art pipeline, in a little over an hour. Hosted by Abdenour Bachir, Lead Character Artist at Crytek, you’ll be taken from the Prototyping phase, including set up in engine and defining your look and function, through texturing and beautifying your art, and then finalizing your model to a shippable state. Abdenour has over 15 years of experience in the industry, and has worked on the Crysis series, Ryse: Son of Rome, and Robinson: The Journey in addition to working on our current production, Hunt: Showdown, so if you want to create character art like a pro dive into the video below.



This tutorial follows the most recent releases of our environment art pipeline video, an in-depth introduction to UI, a series of tutorials covering cinematic storytelling, and our introduction to audio tutorial. Each of these Master Class videos are hosted by Crytek experts and gives you a comprehensive introduction to techniques used on our own titles, so you can use the very same processes that we use in-house. You can find all of the tutorials and get the latest videos by subscribing to our CRYENGINE YouTube channel, where you’ll also find a wide range of other videos which will help you develop your skills.

These videos were made available first to CRYENGINE Insider subscribers. Subscribers are able to tune in live to these regular webinars, and can ask questions during those sessions in real time. You can find out more about how to access this content live and participate yourself by checking out our CRYENGINE membership plans. Becoming a member also means that you are contributing directly to the development of the engine, as well as gaining access to a range of benefits that will help you develop your skills and improve your project.

The feedback on this series of videos has been great, so we hope that you’ll find this tutorial as useful as the others. We’re always listening for ways to improve our learning offering at CRYENGINE, so if you have any feedback or ideas, we look forward to your thoughts on the usual channels - CRYENGINE forums, Facebook, and Twitter.

- Your CRYENGINE Team

EndiHaxhi
December 01, 2017 01:12

Brian- Thanks for taking your time man! It means a lot to me, especially as I plan to switch to Cryengine in about 7 months. Keep up the work!

Cry-Brian
November 29, 2017 15:09

Hi everyone - this is Brian Dilg, the CRYENGINE Learning Manager here at Crytek. First of all, I'd like to thank you both for taking the time to post your insightful comments and suggestions. Your feedback is both perceptive and invaluable to us.

While I can't address development issues directly, I can tell you that the CRYENGINE team has have read your comments and is already working on these kinds of issues. What I can directly address are the learning materials that we offer. I started at Crytek on October 2, 2017, and my mandate can be described pretty simply: I'm here to make CRYENGINE as easy to use and as well supported as it is rewarding to master. Undoubtedly, we have in the past poured more resources into developing the engine and using it ourselves to build games than into providing an adequate, up-to-date supply of tutorials, documentation, and other learning options. That is going to change profoundly.

I'm confident that you'll see an immediate and substantial improvement in the substance, clarity, and technical quality of our learning offerings in the coming months, as well as the announcement of some major initiatives to address some of the issues you've raised. (If you happen to be subscribers, you can see the first webinar I produced with CRYENGINE programmer Alex Klinger on programming custom entity components in C++, released November 23: https://forum.cryengine.com/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=4409 If you're not, you need only wait until late December, when it will become available publicly after one month of exclusive access, as always.)

Among many other things, you will be seeing a whole suite of C++ tutorials, addressing some of the most technically challenging and rewarding aspects of working with the engine. But we will be working just as hard to ease the learning curve for beginners, and provide comprehensive expert guidance on best practices that address the concerns of every job in game development, from level designers to animators to sound designers.

In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to post requests for new tutorials as well as feedback on learning materials we've already posted in the Tutorials section of our CRYENGINE Educational Forum, where other community members can chime in as well: https://forum.cryengine.com/viewforum.php?f=11 That is the single most direct way for our educational and support team to get a sense of what your needs are and how well we're meeting them. While we do try to comb other platforms like Slack and Discord, it is just too time-consuming to comb through the hundreds of daily posts and try to summarize what amounts to requests or feedback with regard to learning assets.

Thanks again for your comments, and keep it coming!

Best,
Brian Dilg
CRYENGINE Learning Manager
Crytek

EndiHaxhi
November 26, 2017 15:35

Silver008-> You are spot on correct, but I would like to add something: Unity is way more barebones than Cryengine. It's not like Cryengine is designed for First/Third person, it just has way more tools than other engines to do those tasks. When you start with a FPS or TPS in mind in both Unity or Unreal, you have to literally do everything from scratch. In Cryengine, you have a comprehensive framework already available to you to prototype your FPS/TPS game instantly. BUT, since that is the only thing that we can do with ease in Cryengine, that is what most of us end up doing, due to lack of docs, tutorials or just bad impressions, that Cryengine can't do, say, an RTS, which it can. Cryengine is way ahead on features, like, it had 2017 features back in 2012, that far ahead. Lighting is amazing. Etc, etc. You can do much more with Cryengine than Unity and Unreal combined, and I say this as a programmer and as a level designer. Never have I seen such good level design tools. Navmesh is automatically generated based on height and is auto-updated based on what differed in the map. Try that stuff in Unity. You have to do a ton of programming, which I can do, because I learned it. But Cryengine does it out of the box, in just 10 seconds.

EndiHaxhi
November 22, 2017 17:43

I really, really love this engine, but you have to step up the tutorial quality. This one needs a lot of work, the video and audio quality alone is a big issue. The clarity and pace are another one. Dependency on proprietary plugins is a major blow, and also dependency on photoshop for simple texture import. The whole system could be refined.
I see things like this: Unity is copper, pretending to be gold. It gets the job done, and is mostly reliable to do the job, although sometimes copper is not what you need.
Cryengine is like Diamond covered in mud. You can see some of the diamond, but you have to clean the mud first. Clean the mud please, give us a nice and intuitive workflow, deprecate flash, integrate easier PBR workflow, make Cryengine more compatible with blender, cryblend just wont do.
Scripting doesn't have to be impossible(it is, there is no way to learn it, no comperhensive tutorials). Stick with C# and Visual Scripting, because they are the future. Document them, and make proper tutorials.
I am 100% certain that once this mud above, like lack of an intuitive workflow and proper docs and tutorials, is what this engine needs. When they are solved, I, and propably nobody will ever choose copper(Unity) to do a diamonds job.
A joyful fan of yours, Endi Haxhi.