One of my favorite projects while at Ubisoft was For Honor. I worked for the Montreal team from Toronto to do about five months of work in just under three. Not only that, I received special training at the Montreal office regarding our proprietary MotionCloth software so that I could show the team in Toronto best practices, as well as to be on hand to troubleshoot any issues that would come up.
While on For Honor, I was responsible for creating full character rigs, addition of dynamic movement, handling cloth simulation, and integrating everything into the proprietary Anvil game engine. I managed to get my hands on almost every character in the game!! While that may sound like one small task, the way our pipeline operated meant that you never saw the complete picture of the rig until it was in engine. Then, you would need to pinpoint anything behaving oddly, and go see if the problem was caused by 3ds Max, MotionCloth, MotionBuilder, or the engine itself. The work was meticulous and extremely detail-oriented… my kind of challenge!!
While I will not go into deep explanations for each character class an armour type, I have included links to Ubisoft’s For Honor website, with many gameplay and cinematic clips available.
Knight Heroes
Of the three factions of heroes available to the public at launch, I spent most of my time working with our Knights characters. While each female and male hero had his or her own base skeleton, there was a lot of attention paid to our cloth simulations and dynamic systems to get the variety and look we wanted.
When it came to armour variations, our goal was to have as many options as possible available for both the female and male versions of each character, on top of a high degree of textile customization. The ability to mix armour set pieces together without having them crashing through one another meant there was a degree of back-and-froth between departments as production progressed.
Some of the character and gear variations I was responsible for include, but are not limited to:
The Wardens– F/M- Arcturus, Loran, Dain, Dullahan, Fendrel
The Conquerers– F/M- Aldys, Bazett, Folkel
The Peacekeepers– F- Fresca
The Lawbringers -F/M- Dheneb, Isocres, Tical, Zelos, Holden Cross’ NPC armour
Lawbringer Breakdown
I ended up doing the majority of rigging work on the Lawbringer and the various sets of armour on both the female and male versions of the character. The in-game armour for the character Holden Cross uses the same rig as the rest of our Lawbringers in the engine.
The Lawbringer rig had many challenges to coming together comprehensively. Great consideration had to be given for the character’s ROM around their shoulders with such large pieces of armour, especially when it came to The Lawbringer’s executions and emotes. To respect our in-engine limits, and to ensure key pieces of the armour had what it needed to deform well, it was a fine balance between making some things run well cheaply, and to make sure other geos had what they needed.
To give you a better visual, on the left is a small breakdown on some elements of the Lawbringer’s armour set(s) that were set up using both our in-engine dynamic bone systems, and MotionCloth.
Samurai Heroes
The other character class I ended up doing a lot of work on were our Samurai.
Unlike the Knights’ stiff plate armour and, relatively, light tunic materials, the Samurai class was different in the materials used, and the lack of stiff, metal pieces. For things like the layering of their kusari, sode, and kusazuri, we were able to get away with some skinning tricks to save on the usage of dynamic systems.
The Kensei– M- Konishi, Ginkei, Himura, Morioka
The Shugoki– M- Daira, Raijin
The Orochi– F/M- Jubei, Nunki, Tenma, Hirao, Zengo, Supaiku
The Nobushi– F- Amano, Otohime
Viking Heroes
With our Viking heroes the main issues we faced were their furs, long braids, beards, and the intermingling of both static pieces–such as bones–and leather. While the Vikings lacked the larger, solid pieces of both the Knights and the Samurai, everything they wore had movement and flexibility.
The Valkyries– F- Mava, Siren, Nebula
The Berserker– F/M- Benetram, Gunteric, Mizar, Acamar
The Warlords– M- Isard, Millia, Solaris
The Raiders– F/M- Aravis, Vaeri, Baten, Dolynn, Polaris
A brief note on The Warlords class on game limits. Though it has been several years upon writing, I recall towards the beginning of my time on for Honor, we had 6 bones driving deformation on his large belt. Over time, to give us the results that were needed on things like The Warlord’s helmet and leather/cloth layers, we had reduced that to only four dynamic bones driving deformations around his midsection. Revisiting the game now, I see that was reduced further to a fairly stiff, large leather belt with minimal deformation.