Character Basemesh System
We have an art team of 2 full timers and 2-3 rotating graduate students and we needed to systemize how we make human characters for our games. This is our basemesh system for rapidly generating new character assets.
Original face topology and rigging tools created by the talented Kirby Culbertson
Sculpting, texturing and posing of new characters and clothing by myself.
Clothing on the right three posed characters made by Cassandra Ortiz and Darren Woodland
One master head was make and UV unwrapped, then we sculpted the heads into different forms like you might do to make blendshapes.
Because they share a UV map we can share textures between all the heads.
Using vertex color smart material in painter we automated the masking of skin features like lips, eyesockets, eyelashes, nose holes, and skin. This allowed us to bake out a library of skintones for each head to mix and match in photoshop.
The result is a wide variety of heads and skintones we can quickly pull from to crank out lots of characters for our small team.
We have a simple male and female basemesh with mirrored UVs
When we start a new character we simply slap a head onto a basemesh and then just worry about clothing them to define their characteristics. Lucky for me our other full-timer is more technical so he's written several scripts and tools for auto-rigging.
Here we have a science woman fully clothed and textured. Our games run in WebGL so we bake lighting and details all into the diffuse texture.
Here is the cast of NPC characters for one of our games made using this system.