 Hello, this is Viviane and I got to design this young lady called Gabby for the Settlers project. Gabby went through quite a few changes initially, she didn't even start out as a girl. We intended to make a body for Lunte and reuse a lot of what we had already built. We really wanted to use this hairstyle from Luntus Concepts and just adjust proportions and colors, but then we got interested in what could be under the mask. And the bodies changed into siblings, a younger brother and his older sister. We knew that there wouldn't be enough time to go back and give Lunte a face, so Gabby finally became her own character with a brand new outfit. Instead of a mask, she's got her goggles, a compass and more neutral clothing. It's implied she's somehow into science, but she could still be used in a range of scenarios. As with all the Settlers, the design is supposed to be easy to animate and give people plenty of freedom to play around. So her limbs are pretty simple, no elbows, no knees, so they can bend and stretch in all sorts of ways. Animation really doubled down on that and took all the liberties the designer allows for and that sure counts as a win for a character designer. Same goes for the face, there was no time for an expression sheet, but we wanted to have features to be very flexible and the nose was designed to wander around the face if need be. We decided to skip the turnaround sheet, so Julian worked from this drawing and a few sketches. This means there were quite a few things that needed to be figured out, so the character would look appealing from every angle. You can check out all the little notes and draw overs on the blender cloud, but most of them were about how exactly the head and hair and goggles would interact and keeping things as simple as possible. This isn't really the usual way of going about designing a character, but with a small team and quick feedback loops you can get good results and keeping all departments involved is really a nice experience. Going into modeling of Gabby, the first thing to do is gathering important concepts and references, either from just drawing, sketches, turnaround, concept exploration or more. Think about the shapes and identify possible bottlenecks in the design. How do you plan to model certain shapes? Plan ahead. What can be modeled and what can be textured later on? How will the shapes deform or facial features behave in animation? Gather additional design inspirations and technical or anatomy references if possible. And put all of this in a collage on the side if you have a second monitor, that would be great. Also make sure other info is discussed before and set in stone, like the size of the world and the character. You can drag and drop reference images as empties into blender or just import them as regular images. Make sure the right overlays are enabled and the right shading is used for either of those options. This is great for turntable references in particular or if you don't have a second monitor. Generally a really good way of creating any character is of course in stages, but since there was so little time available I went a bit faster with this character and a bit more direct. I knew what I needed to do based on how we made the previous character, Lunte, the first settler character and even recycled some objects of that model to save some time in this step. The first thing to get right is the basic proportions and shapes in the blocking step. The shapes were overall very simple, which made it really easy to start out and refine primitive objects like cylinders and cubes and even sculpt on them directly instead of using remersures. A good practice is to model a character incrementally from low detail to high detail instead of one piece at a time. So keep the bigger picture of the character in mind. Then go in further and define the final design and shapes in the sculpting step. This doesn't necessarily mean using the remersures, just that the 3D shapes need to be completely worked out. Adding color in this step also is very important since you get a better impression of the 3D design and how the character looks. The facial elements were meant to be very flexible and movable across the entire face. So we decided to go with curved-based eyes and mouths and a free-floating nose and eyebrows. At this point, these were just design placeholders and could be replaced later on with actual rigged meshes. The hair was at first just a box-modeled base for the general proportions, but afterwards I added curves with bevel profiles to add individual clumps of hair. I can really recommend the bevel curve tools add-on for this, to make the process very fast. After converting the curves into meshes, I was able to sculpt further on them to refine the placement and shapes even more. Once everything is roughly in place, it's important to share your progress with the rest of the team. Based on the current progress, there was a lot of feedback and back and forth for better design, rigging, animation and more. These thoughts and concerns were then able to be addressed and a semi-final character could already be shared with others for the first rigging and shading tests. To get the final character model though, it's necessary to properly retapologize and or clean up the model. Until now, the focus was most of all on the design of the 3D character. And some aspects were kept loose and mostly live. So now modifiers and transforms can be applied and the geometry can be polished more. Loops can be straightened, added and realigned for better rigging and animation. And so the model gets passed on to other pipeline steps. Hey, this is Demeter and I will give you a quick rundown on the rigging process for Gabby as well as other settlers characters. The main idea of my rigging workflow currently is I use the Rigify addon and I'm developing a custom feature set for it called Cloud Rig, which will be available sometime in the future. So if you've never used Rigify before, the main idea behind Rigify is that you have a meta rig which looks like this, which is responsible for storing the parameters for generating the actual rig. So if I select this upper arm here, you can see that that upper arm is assigned the Cloud Limbs Rigify type. And that has all of these parameters which will define how the rig will behave. For example, you can adjust the deform segments, B1 segments, whether it creates shape key helpers, whether it creates a final control. I'm not going into detail on any of this stuff, but I hope you get the idea. And so to give some more examples, this was the Cloud Limbs Rig type. And then you can also have a Cloud FK chain, this one is a Cloud Spine. And an interesting one for the face is Cloud Curve. The reason I say that's interesting is because it takes an existing curve as a parameter, which is this one in this case, Curve-Mouth. And so you can see the curve points for that right here. And so if we read the description for this, it says create hook controls for an existing Bezier curve. And if we look at the generative rig, you can see that it did just that. So it created these controls to control that curve. And in case you're not sure how that's done, you can hook curves to bones using hook modifiers. And so these were created by the rig generation process, which means I can delete these. As well as, by the way, I could go into the generative rig and just make a complete mess of everything. And as soon as I regenerate the rig, everything is back to normal. So I know I'm not going into much detail here, but you can see how this can save a lot of time. Setting up these hook modifiers, not to mention, you would have to do the same thing for both of the eyes. And of course, if somebody decides to make a change to the character design, then I can adjust really quickly. So the hard part is just implementing these rig types in Python. But there you go. I hope that gives you a rough idea of my current rigging workflow or at least the rig generation workflow, and that's it from me. I was tasked with coming up with a front personality for Gabby that fits her design and to come up with a short scene that complements that personality. A great place to start is to grab the character and do some experiments. Get familiar with the bones and make some walk cycles, run cycles, or just silly poses. This is when you might notice some stuff that needs to be tweaked, so you need to give some feedback to the rigger. Because of the tight deadline, I was only able to give limited feedback, so I dressed some of the lower hanging fruits and kept on going. Out of the experiments, I came up with some basic mental notes to use as the animation style guideline. Hit poses hard. Stay completely in three quarters. Rubber hose, arms, and legs. Shorten the legs. It looks sillier when she's walking, running. Just sounds like fun. Don't be afraid to hold dead poses. As clear silhouette as possible. That means arms out as much as possible. Favour quick steps that cause smears. Experiment with different smear effects. Allow the arms to stretch as much as needed. Disfigure the hands when needed. Mix up the happy slash evil slash grumpy emotions. Minimal drag and follow through on the hair. It's too expensive. And finally, narrow camera lens. I went with about 80mm. The shading of Gabby was generally based on the shading style we used for Lunter. You can check out a breakdown of the Lunter shading on the Blender Cloud. In short, it is based on EV with the Shaded to RGB node to simplify the light information. But for Gabby I introduced another highlight pass to the base shaders to be able to get these crisp rim lights. It works the same way as just adding the light information. To introduce some subtle surface texture, I simply used a noise texture with an increased roughness value on the surfaces that needed it. Other than that and some soft gradients, I used texturing very sparingly to achieve that simplified look. But further than trying to create a visually compelling look for the character, they were also a couple of technical challenges to be tackled in the shading. You've seen that Demeter has done some rigging magic to make the facial elements work freely on a geometry level. But that can only go so far and we decided to do the pupils and the highlights in the eyes and also the teeth and tongue in the mouth on a shader level instead. That bypasses the problem of masking out the shapes and also allows for some cool effects. The parallax effect on the eyes is achieved by shifting the texture coordinates depending on the view angle and the effect on the tongue is using a method called ray marching to make it seem as if it was an actual 3D object even though it's just a flat mouth. You can check out the character file if you want to take a deep dive into those. To make the facial elements actually controllable with the rig, I set up a library of drivers with all the transform information about the bones that the shaders need. The challenge then is to correctly transform the texture space so that the eyes don't just fly away, no matter how the bones are oriented. For the look of the entire scene, we settled on a complimentary background color to make Gabby with a green hair really pop out and that misty atmosphere to push away the background and sell this unlively environment. When setting up the lighting in the full scene, it is usually very useful to be able to make adjustments to the character's shading based on your lighting setup to fit the character into the environment. To be able to do that, I exposed some settings in the character file to a separate node group called Gabby settings and these settings then can be accessed and overridden from within the lighting file using a couple of lines of Python code. Another way of overriding color information of a shader is making use of the object color. That color is unique to the object and thus can change between different instances. I used this to adjust the tint of the shadows on the skin and the process of lighting the scene. It has also proven very useful to chain a final subsurface scattering shader into the node tree that helps immensely with grounding the character into the environment by collecting additional lighting information without producing any sharp edges. The lighting setup itself is focused on providing a bluish tint in the highlights while securing a general warmth and soft shadows. But it also relies heavily on the rim lights produced by the two sun lamps that I'm using to make the focal points glow for that spacey look.