Watchmen: The Twilight Lady

She is an in-game model.

These images were captured from real time game engine.

She is "The Twilight Lady", the last boss character of "Watchmen: The End is Nigh part 2 and The Complete Experience".As you can see, she is "The Dominatrix", the queen of queens.

14,874 polygons (Triangle)

Textures

1024*1024 x2(Head, Skin part)

1024*2048 x2(Costume, Hair)

512*1024 x1(Lacings of the costume)

512*512 x1(Eye)

They have Diffuse, Specular, Normal textures.

The textures were made with maximum size firstly, after that they were changed into suitable/necessary size by game designer.

In game, they were shrunken into half to quarter size mostly.

Only for PR visual works, they were used with original resolution.

The facial animation skeleton system.

Basically, all characters in the game shared same structure with above.
This skeleton system was managed separately from "Main-Body" skeleton system.
It means, we had simple skeleton system firstly, and it already started to work in our unique game engine.
It was named “Kappow editor”, a engine developed by Deadline Games.

I didn't want to break whole of the animation system in the game.
So I had a idea of this “separated facial skeleton system”.
This could manage totally separately from body animation system.

Facial animations could be managed totally independently, so we could tweak the facial animations quite safely, without to worry to break the main body animations.

In the image above, all of facial skeletons are very long.
Why all skeletons are long is, the game engine didn’t support “translation” animation on skeleton at that point. So, all animations needed to be managed with only rotation animation of skeletons.

It was obviously a big limitation for me at first time, but I realized positive side of it soon.

It was, “we could use same animation data for all of generic enemy characters”, even they had different face. To move these skeletons into suitable location in each of faces, the animation worked without any problem.
As a result, we could save a lot of animation works and memory space.

Main characters used same skeleton system as well, but they had unique animation data, to give uniqueness.
But even though, how many kind of animation sets for facial for whole of the game was, only 4 kinds. NiteOwl, Under Boss, Twilight Lady, these unique 3 main class characters, and all of rest of enemies. Very less numbers.

Images from ZBrush.

When I started to model her, only a rough “standing pose sketch from front side” was a reference what I could have.It was looks cool, but not enough information, of course.
Also the concept art haven’t approved with Warner and DC yet.

It means, to start to her was obviously contained risks. But even though, we/I needed to start to do it, because of the deadline of the project.

Firstly I needed to think on the design of back side of her costume. I discussed with the art director and a concept artist of our team, and then we decided to give “lacing details” and the tight waist belt that has iconic “lighting” mark at a belt loop.On her face, also it hadn't designed at all, so I created her face with my idea.

Luckily, the response from Warner and DC was good, they could be satisfied with the model.
They just said "nice model!". It was really happy for me.