Atomfall: Modular Civilians

Atomfall: Modular Civilians
Some of the villager civilian components I worked on myself for Atomfall, along with planning and managing all the character art.
We had the challenge of populating a village full of civilians and more along with the different factions and story characters and oddities in the mishap zone for Atomfall.
To achieve this we worked on a modular character system going beyond anything we had done before at Rebellion, allowing in-engine mix and match heads, upper body, lower body, hair and headwear, along with material variants to create a wide range of characters economically.
We also started integrating photogrammetry into the character workflow, ending up with a hybrid approach, with the photogrammetry grounding the character art with an advanced level of realism.

Male Base Body
We had a few photogrammetry scans for this, I used a single one of these but reworked it in zbrush whilst fitting it onto our rig, as the original scan was way too buff.
Additionally, by the time the hands had been forced on to the rig the form was unusably mangled, so I ended up remaking the hands manually.
I worked with the Rigging Animator on the topology, particular emphasis went into the flow of edges around the shoulder, so it would retain form and flow in a range of arm poses, rifle aim poses for example. The head topo we inherited from previous projects, shown here with one of the better head scans.

Villager elements
This was the first outfit made for Atomfall and my introduction to photogrammetry. We have a photogrammetry team who taught me how to shoot and process the data. I shot and worked up the jacket, shirt and trousers. The Fedora was one I made from scratch. The head pictured was adapted from multiple scans and reworked manually, to be used for the pub landlord and his brother Nat who you meet at the start of the game (with the addition of his muttonchop sideburns).
These jacket and shirt materials I completely reworked as optional variants in Substance Painter.

The trousers were some old ones of mine. A few times I ended up using clothes of my own for scanning, along with items from the costume shop Rebellion had just acquired, items bought in specifically for the project and things borrowed from colleagues. As we got into the more outlandish faction costumes we constructed increasingly eccentric outfits to shoot, and incorporated more bespoke digitally made elements.

Dungarees elements
I shot and worked up the dungarees, shirt and cap. I made the basebody by adapting a bought in scan.The head was adapted and reworked from a couple of head scans and ultimately used for story character Joyce Tanner.

All the boots pictured were made from photogrammetry by my esteemed colleague Chris Williams.
These few characters were just the tip of the iceberg of all the character assets we made for Atomfall. With thanks to the Rebellion Character Art team, Concept Art, Management and Atomfall team members for their input and contributions to Atomfall’s character art!