Ship of Heroes, the upcoming spiritual successor to City of Heroes, has unveiled a completely custom character creator built from the ground up by the devs at Heroic Games. Their rapid development cycle required just under one year, and the current version is fully integrated into their new game. The platform for the game is Unreal Engine 4.
Ship of Heroes, the upcoming spiritual successor to City of Heroes, has unveiled a completely custom character creator built from the ground up by the devs at Heroic Games. Their rapid development cycle required just under one year, and the current version is fully integrated into their new game. The platform for the game is Unreal Engine 4.
More on Ship of Heroes: https://www.shipofheroes.com/
The CCT (Character Creation Tool) incorporates character models from Unreal and from iClone, all of which have been extensively customized to achieve the proportions, skeletal structure variations, and numerous appearance options needed for players to build truly unique characters. The player animations have been extensively customized to match the game models. Special attention has been given to ensure that the character poly-counts will stay within predetermined ranges suitable for an MMO without sacrificing model quality.
The Ship of Heroes character creator already incorporates numerous cutting-edge technical features of the Unreal Engine, including:
- Subsurface mapping on the skin to produce a subtle skin sheen
- The latest eye model from Unreal, plus highly customized retinal textures
- The most advanced Unreal hair shader for more detailed hair
- APEX physics for moving both hair and clothing realistically, including capes
In addition, the SOH devs have custom coded each article of clothing to reduce clipping from costume parts that overlay each other. Over 300 individual character morphs are showcased in the video, and the underlying databases are already in place to process up to 1,000 morphs. Changing the character dimensions automatically changes the costume of the character wearing it. Color customization options are enormously flexible, allowing each piece to be separately colored with primary and secondary colors.
The character creator allows up to ten clothing or costume pieces to be added to a character: helmet, shoulders, arms, hands, underwear, chest, pants, belt, and feet. A large selection of clothing and costume items is already included in the CCT, and much of it is proprietary work from the artists at Heroic Games. More costumes will be added as the game expands; some of these are already on display in the Design Studio articles on the Ship of Heroes website.
