NOTE: This entry is copied from the Official Silent Hill Blog and AOMM is no way affiliated! This entry is only here for archiving purposes!

The “Art” of Re-Imagination
December 3, 2009

Since IGN released the sweet concept art a few weeks ago, people have really been talking about it. I’ve had a lot of friends request clean versions of the pictures to use as desktop backgrounds and the like. It’s exciting to see such a positive reaction to re-imagined versions of old and in many cases beloved characters (I even saw a comment that someone likes new Lisa *gasp* better than the old design!). I thought it would be interesting to go more indepth about re-designing these characters and how they get from someone’s brain

Prior to our team taking over production of Silent Hill Origins a couple of years ago, I had played all the iterations of Silent Hill to date, and the first 2 titles in the series certainly left a lasting impression. At the time they seemed to me to be quite ground breaking in many respects, not least in the way that they wove the threads of the narrative seamlessly into the very fabric of the game world- many visual aspect contributed toward this aesthetic, creating for the viewer an intense, convincing and genuinely oppressive journey through a series of psychologically disturbing adventures.

There were many contributing factor toward this atmosphere and sense of immersion- not least was the graphical quality of the characters found wandering the streets of the town. Eschewing the universally accepted norms of the time, Silent Hill’s “heroes” were flawed- they were physically weak, unskilled with firearms, unsure of the events that were unfolding around them and unable to maintain any semblance of control as everything they knew slowly but inevitably spiralled into hell. They exhibited unashamedly their fragility, their fear of intimacy, their anger and confusion.

They were, in short, incredibly human. In the strongest of these characters this humanity was manifest in a palpably physical way- the small details and blemishes of the skin, thin blue capillaries meandering faintly beneath its surface, the hyper-realistic tones and hues that shift over different parts of the body, all the subtle nuances and imperfections combine to imbue the protagonist with a visual credibility that set them apart from their peers.

Even now, the best of Silent Hill past stand their ground firmly against the hordes of generic, plastic skinned, muppet-jawed denizens that populate the bulk of contemporary videogame titles, and particularly from the now often seen survival “action/horror” hero, armed to the teeth with Uzi 9mm’s and RPG’s and just itching to blow the crap out of those monsters, accompanied by a few obligatory one liners. No bad going.

Due to the obvious technical restrictions of the PS1 hardware, those that haven’t stood the test of time so well are those of the first title in the series- but they are also some of the most fondly remembered- perhaps even cherished- characters in the series.

So here we are “re-imagining” them.

An initial consideration was how much of the original Silent Hill 1 renditions of the characters should remain in this new tale. There was a certain inevitability that some would react adversely to us trampling all over this sacred turf but, after some discussion, we felt that a re-imagining of the first chapter in the series also necessitated taking the same approach to the characters, and so decided that rather than be driven by nostalgia, the characters should be adapted to fit the story that we wanted to tell, rather than vice versa.
Of course this didn’t mean that we were completely abandoning what had been done before; there are many instances where the members of the old cast retain elements of their former incarnations both in visual terms and with regard to their personal circumstances- some, of course, will appear surprisingly different. Many of the traits discussed above are present in the characters of Shattered Memories, albeit sometimes in a slightly more subtle manner than previous titles.

The process begins with a discussion between the creative Leads concerning the nature of the character- their role in the narrative, the type of person that they are and how they may influence the psychological aspects of the game. We debate how they may react in different circumstances (and also how their alternative versions react to the same circumstances), the colour of their hair, the colour of their eyes, the colour of their skin, their fashion sense (if, indeed, they had any), etc, etc, until we have a fairly good idea of who each character is.

From this discussion Sam produces a written character brief, accompanied by a sheet of reference images to act as inspiration for the face, hair and clothing style. Once we are agreed on the content of this it is submitted to Tomm for approval, and then the development process begins…

The first stage is the production of the concept artwork. We work closely with a team of artists and tried at this stage to produce a set of images that would capture the essence of each character, something to act as inspiration for our character artists rather than just a simple blueprint.

Starting with a series of pencil sketches, each character evolves through a series of re-iterative stages, gradually refining the detail of the characters until we reach a point where we have satisfied that we have captured something of the essence of the character. The final stage is the production of a series of detailed portraits of each character, some of which have recently been released onto the Internet.

When a piece concept work is complete we begin production of the actual 3D models. From the outset the character creation for this project was a considerable task- not just because of the number of characters that we needed and the emphasis on producing high quality, but also because all of the characters had several variations- most of these so different that they where effectively a whole new character- substantially increasing the workload (and pressure) on the character team. Fortunately they were up for the challenge.

It was very important to us, and to the narrative, that the cast of Shattered Memories came across convincingly as real people (albeit some of whom occasionally exhibit somewhat surreal behaviour), so a suitable amount of time, thought and effort was put into the creation of the in-game characters.

We wanted to ensure that all characters had a high level of polygonal and textural detail, something that generally seemed to be lacking on the Wii in general, and the end results were achieved through a combination of 2D artwork and 3D sculpting. Although we decided against trying to implement normal mapped detail on the characters (the Wii doesn’t natively support this, and all the other technical processes going on at render time meant that we were pushing the hardware quite far as it was), all characters were created partially in 3D sculpting packages, allowing us to create a high level of 3D detail and then bake the light and shadow detail into the texture maps for a cohesive and realistic layer of detail. The in-game 3D mesh was then modified to add extra relief to this detail.

The biggest part of a character is always the face. In nature no human face is entirely symmetrical, and this is one of the aspects of video game art that often lets it down- the artist may model half the face, texture it, then flip the whole thing- whilst it might be technically and visually pleasing, such work has something slightly unreal about. Not so Silent Hill. In keeping with the series tradition, Shattered Memories cast exhibit the small flaws and nuances add asymmetrical detail that add a subtle level of realism that may not be immediately apparent, but adds to the believability of the character.

Of course, the face isn’t just about how it looks, but how it moves. All the detail in the world is wasted if it isn’t capable of performing more than a few robotic facial movements. We invested a lot of time in creating characters facial animation (no small task considering the large number of cut-scenes- many of which have several variations), and again added a lot of asymmetrical movement to ensure that a number of convincing human expressions could be achieved.

One of the other details I was pleased with was the way that we created and rendered the hair. Getting layers of transparency to draw in the correct order, known as “alpha sorting”, is one of the traditional bugbears of real-time video game rendering, so I was pleased on Shattered Memories that we managed to achieve a far more comprehensive solution for the characters hair, with layers of semi-transparency rendering flawlessly on top of each other. This looks particularly nice when casting soft shadows upon the characters faces.

The challenge of taking this cast of characters and presenting them in a new context was one that our art team, aware of the legacy of high quality character artwork, was eager to take up, and proved to a tough but very rewarding experience. We hope that the player will also find the game as rewarding, and that they will also enjoy our interpretations of these characters- whichever ones they happen to meet…

source: SHSM Blog – The “Art” of Re-Imagination | 12/03/2009