Our blog’s been a little lazy here unfortunately, so I’ll strike it with an insightfully intriguing post on the Rooks Keeps character content pipeline. I won’t go into the specifics of actually creating the content, rather focussing on the work inside UnrealEd. This doesn’t include the rather large coding side of things either; it’s simply the content side of things. That’s somehting for another section entirely.

So, let’s start at the beginning then.
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Firstly, we design the character, followed by the concept art for it. DC does the concept art and modeling for the character, then the UV’s and then renders up all the required maps that I will need for texturing (Normal, Ambient-Occlusion, Cavity and Wireframe). Once texturing concludes, I’ll do the rig and create the required animations, sounds and anything else specific to the character (such as masks).
Once all the work outside of UE is finshed, it’s time to get it all ready for the game. And that’s the stuff I’ll list and explain here.
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-Meshes:
The characters are made up of several meshes, and also require other objects for various gore and FX related purposes.

• Character  [The actual character mesh/rig]
• Weapons  [The weapon(s) and other attachments that the character holds in their hands]
• Head  [This is a character specific head gib used for gore]
• Gibs  [These are a global set of gibs used for all characters. These include both flesh and metal pieces]

-Textures: [Often a character has more than one material slot]
The character requires a fair number of textures, which includes the usual Diffuse/Specular/Normal set and extras such as masks and emissive maps. The textures (primarily the masks) will often have various color channels dedicated to specific material functions, which will be listed here as “RGBA=”.

• Diffuse  [This is the characters primary color map and sets the overall look of the character]  [A=OpacityMask]
• Specular  [This sets the 'shininess' of the character texture]
• Normal  [The normal map appears to add extra detail to the mesh, by performing some voodoo magic]
• Emissive  [This map indicates areas of the texture that are unaffected by lighting, and is often used to make areas glow]
• MaterialMask  [We use this texture to set various properties on the characters material, such as reflection intensity, specular power and others]  [R=Reflection G=SpecularPower B=Fresnel A=DetailNormal]
• Color Mask  [This mask indicates which areas of the character can be colored by the in-game color chooser. It also sets where blood appears]  [R=PrimaryColor G=SecondaryColor B=WeaponBlood A=SprayBlood]
• Gore Mask  [The gore mask indicates specific areas used by the gore system]  [R=Decapitation G=FootBlood B=InjuryBlood]
• Footsteps  [These are bloody footstep textures used as decals when a character walks through a blood pool]
• Head Gibs  [The textures used by the head gib meshes]
• Gibs  [Gib textures]
• Decals  [Blood decals used for various gore requirements, such as spatters, explosions, pools and drips]
• Particles  [These are the textures used by the various particle systems, including gore and weapon effects]

-Animations:

• Walk
• Run
• Charge  [A walking sequence used when a piece is in combat with another]
• Idle
• Idle one-shots  [Idle sequences to break up the otherwise looping idle animation]
• Blocking
• Quick Attacks
• Slow Attacks
• Parry: Left / Right / Up / Down  [Each piece requires a parry sequence in each basic direction]
• Quick Attacks Parried  [These sequences are used when the attack of the character is parried by the enemy]
• Slow Attacks Parried  [These sequences are used when the attack of the character is parried by the enemy]
• Death: Stab / Slash / Decapitated / Fried
• Pain
• Dodge

-Sounds:

• Pain[Beasts]
• Effort[Beasts]  [Used when the character attacks and performs some other movements]
• Die[Beasts]
• Impacts  [These are sounds of weapons successfully hitting characters. They come in both flesh and metal variants]
• Footsteps  [These include various foot types on various surface types]
• Swing Weapon  [Played when weapons are swung]
• Attacks  [Character attack sounds. Right now, these are used by the Bishops of both sides]
• Parry Attack  [The sound played by the attackers weapon when it is parried]
• Enemy Parry  [Played by the victims weapon when it successfully parries an attack]
• Weapons on ground  [Played by weapons left by dead players as they are moved around]
• Corpse Impacts  [Sounds of dead bodies been moved around by other players]
• Blood Splats  [When blood hits a surface]
• Decapitation  [The joyous sound of a head leaving it's owner]
• Gibs  [Gib impacts with surfaces]
• Heads  [Decapitated head impacts with surfaces]
• Explosion  [When a character explodes]

-FX:
-Particles

• Gore Slash
• Gore Stab
• Gore Smash
• Gore Decap
• Gore Explode
• Gib Trails  [Blood particles flicking off flying bits]
• Weapon Impacts  [Played when weapons parry]
• Weapon Drips  [Blood drips from bloody weapons]
• Weapon Trails  [Trails left by weapons swinging through the air]
• Attacks  [Effects used by certain attacks, such as the Bishop fire and lighting]

-Decals

• Blood Pools
• Blood Splats
• Blood Footsteps
• Gib Impacts
• Blood Explosion

-Other/Miscellaneous: These are some of the other, equally important, elements that need to be added:

Material
The primary material/shader of all characters. This blends all the character textures and masks into the final shader that is applied to the meshes.

Material Instances
These are instances of the main character material that simply change variables from it’s parent.

AnimTree
The ‘AnimTree’ handles most animation functionallity, animation blending, and is used for other features such as: Shrinking head bones for decapitation and Foot placement IK.

Physics Asset
The Physics asset is used for Ragdoll physics and other physics based calculations and collisions.

Mesh LOD’s
The main character mesh also requires 3 extra LOD’s to improve performance when required. These can, fortunately, be generated inside UE.

Sockets
Sockets are locations placed on meshes that are referenced by code.

• Neck [Spawns a head stump mesh when decapitated]
• HeadGore [Gore particle spray upon decapitation]
• Three Weapon Edges [These are used by weapon FX trails, referenced by animation notifies]
• Weapon Sockets [Held weapons]

Notifies
Notifies set events during animation sequences, such as when to play trails left by weapons as they swing and when to play footstep sounds.

Cloth
Physics calculated cloth objects, such as the cloaks on the King and Queen of the ‘Knights’ faction.

Physics Material
Physics materials set various properties on meshes and physics objects.

SoundCues
Sounds Cues are used to blend together various sounds, tweak volumes, attenuation and other audio properties. Almost all sounds played are SoundCues.

Map Based Environment/Reflection-maps
We’ve added support to character materials, that allows them to search for map-specific reflection maps.
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Whew! And that’s that for now! As you can see, a lot of work goes into each character piece, and this doesn’t include the actual content creation and coding for them.

I trust you found this insightful, useful or an otherwise educational experience. If, on the other hand, you were bored stiff and angry by the end of it.. Hahaha! Sucker!

With this, player controlled combat is now the primary focus of Rooks Keep, putting chess into the backseat. If you can’t imagine how the game works, to try to give you a general idea of what exactly Rooks Keep is; basically, Rooks Keep is a bit like Unreal Tournament with swords!

Also not minor is that the Beasts have been added. This means there are now 12 characters in-game to engage in various flavors of brutal asymmetric combat.

Screenshots:

Don’t let the wild character colors frighten you, we’ll be attending to those as we go.
Also notice ShadowBlade’s new UI graphics compared to the previous shots of the UI I posted.

It just so happens that the beasts have a bishop as well and here is the creature that is the bishop of the beasts. Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite… or scrath… or use evil magic… unless it does.

How about some scupltures… Behold the olympian physique of a champion warrior and leader, but for now heres king blubber bag:

This is the bishop in shades of brightened black:

Just one more to go…

Next up, you can see my the next installment in my ongoing quest to master muscles. This is the Pawn. You can call him the “Ratman”, but he doesn’t really like that.

Well, there you have the the first three beasts. It was quite a bit of work (learning more about muscle structure, especially on the forearms), but it got more fun as I learnt. Hopefully you like them.

Here are some shots of how the initial meshes were built:

And the Pawn:

And these for good measure:

Next up, the King and the Bishop…
Can anyone guess what they’ll look like?

This time, I’m crafting the grotesque creatures that hail from the darker recesses of Rooks Keep.
In Rooks Keep players will get a selection of chess sets to play as.
While our previous set of characters were all a bit cleaner and outfitted with metal suits of armor, these beasts have a different style. Their bulky bodies are bulging with muscle and while some of them use only their natural claws or blades. They all wear minimal armor and what litte equipment they do have is crude and worn.
If you stretch your mind a bit, you might notice that the monsters of Quake 1 lent an inspirational hand to their design.

BE WARNED: What you are about to see includes graphic representation of endevours not entirely finished, one might even call them work-in-progress…

Knight
This friendly customer is going to be the Knight for the beasts side. It will joyfully hack its oppoents with two big sharp implements.

As you can see it doesn’t have textures yet and the materials are not the most fancy. This is the high-detail sculpted mesh with about 8 million polygons. As you can see I’ve been having lots of fun with muscles and trying to get a reasonable skin on him.
We’ll be sure to post some updated shots when SB gets to work on the textures.

Here are some shots showing the early construction of the mesh. Now you can see how I used box modelling and took it from that initial, basic “box chicken” to the snarling beast at the end. I then stuck a piece of armor on top and moved on to the high detail work.



To get it to this stage took about 5 hours.
Here is a shot of the state it was in just before sculpting.

I did the armore and it’s straps in high detail and prepared the rest of the mesh for scuplting by applying smoothing. I also cut some extra loops into the teeth and spike to retain their shape when smoothed.

Ogre / Rook
And then there’s the next one! Right now, I am working on the brutish ogre that will be the Rook on the beasts side!
He’s not done yet. I am in the middle of sculpting my way through the various pieces.


As you can see I’m getting lots of practice on muscles. Its tough, but its getting easier. I think I am getting better at them with each mesh. What makes them even more fun is that there are slight differences on every reference I’ve got.

And for good measure, here are some earlier shots.

That is the LD mesh and the other is the other is the partial HD mesh just before going to sculpting. Notice how the hard ‘mechanic’ style parts have been detailed out while the organic pieces are just smoothed out.

Ok, enough for now. When I’ve finished this little bugger, I’ll fire off arender or two and post those along with some shots of the initial progression.