Battlefield 6 - BTS
Hello, super proud and excited to show a small peek through the curtain of how Battlefield 6 characters were made, from super early days to the present! As a Key Character Artist my primary responsibilities were to drive key character initiatives, building workflows and pipelines, lookdev and RND work. However, the biggest part of my role is collaboration. All this effort is a result of extensive collaboration through the years - multiple studios, multiple disciplines, multiple experiences.
In this post I want to focus on the many contributors and key collaborators, people who don't always get the spotlight but had massive impact on the final result.
First of all - I want to thank my key collaborators in Tech Anim: Harald Zlattinger and Felix Lang, who handled the complex face pipeline and character tooling to run like clockwork.
Frostbite, for pushing character rendering forward - Yasin Uludag for crazy advancements in Strand Hair rendering, Leo Taslaman for the sim side of it, Robin Taillandier for anything cloth system related, Viktor Alm on the rendering side, and many more!
Also worth mentioning SEED for helping out with face scanning, along with EA Create for taking these scans and consistently delivering quality. EASH for helping out on early R&D tasks. Anton Liivak for the cosmetics system. Makoto Tanaka on the Tech Art side for helping with any request and optimisations. Special thanks to Anders Caspersson for building Scan Server and helping with scan processing automation. DICE IT for continuous support.
And of course, big thanks to all the artists across BF Studios and our external partners for their passion and amazing art.
Early RND and 1:1 lookdev to validate shaders, lighting and new features as a foundation for content, workflows and pipeline.
Early RND and lookdev to stress test facial expressions
Early RND and lookdev on battle torn look
Shot from pre-rendered Frostbite cinematics
The pipeline aims to support all Battlefield experiences and minimize any quality loss. This way you can have heavy Single-Player assets and Multiplayer assets that reach parity in quality levels
Now I can cover the pipeline basics on a very high level. It all starts with mannequins which are copies of our in-game basemesh.
We 3D print all mannequins internally at DICE. This allows for quick turnarounds and iteration.
Next step is dressing up the character - here you can see us working with our miltiary advisor - Göran Åbonde who's been with for many Battlefields
Once the dress up is complete - we place it on the platform where we scan the character.
This is how real-life transforms into digital world. The scans use special processing that minimizes clean-up time. However, the artists still needs to do some work in collaboration with Tech Anim, Animation and ADs to make sure it's optimal for the game.
Here's another example - in this case this is British Assault character dress up.
And this is how it went from real world into in-game asset. This is captured in real-time from Frostbite.