Liege - Character and Animation Revamp

Liege had a kickstarter update recently and announced how they are redoing the characters and animations. This is a big update with a lot of details not present here.

Since we don't have a big team of artists and animators to churn out variations for all the playable characters, enemies, and NPCs we'll need, the plan was to create a handful of base meshes and simply re-texture them as needed.

This was limiting for a number of reasons:

• Not enough variation overall
• Limited control over individual character shapes and silhouettes
• Lots of overhead for downstream work like animation
• Character appearance can't change dynamically (i.e. equipment changes)
• Characters look terrible up close!

After stumbling on some amazing new tools, I decided to redo our character creation process to address these issues. The new system allows us to create characters in a modular way that's more efficient and delivers better results.

Here's a quick video before I get into details:

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Wearable items

With the problem of creating different faces and body types solved, the next issue we need to tackle is wearable items. As mentioned above, previously we were simply re-texturing a handful of generic base meshes to "fake" the appearance of clothing and armor. The new system allows us to use swappable meshes instead, which takes some more work but gives much better results overall:

More information.

I guess it's the art style, but the characters all look like they're 13 year olds. (With the possible exception of the ones with facial hair.) They have feminine features, youthful foreheads, small jaws, and large eyes.