How It's Done — Nessa Riggs
The process of creating Nessa Riggs, one of the central characters in War Robots game. From concept to final result.
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More about the animated version of Nessa:
We've wanted to animate our pilots for a long time, but we can't afford fully 3D characters yet, due to some technical limitations – including a huge roster. A great solution was to use Spine for 2D animation. Animation in Spine has several advantages that are important for us: for example, here you can make skeletal animations, which gives animators more control and makes their work easier, while making the movements of characters natural and smooth.
Another important point: you can make reusable animations – it's convenient when you have dozens and dozens of characters in the game. And, of course, Spine animations can be easily integrated into different game engines, and the size of the animation file is small, which is important when working with mobile devices.
Despite the fact that the development of animated Titan pilots takes more time, we are very happy with the result and are going to continue.
Nessa Riggs is a Legendary Pilot in our mobile tactical shooter War Robots. Let’s discuss how we created her character model — this process is applied to basically all our Pilots.
Nessa first appeared in War Robots during the Cruel Winter event in September, 2022.
The initial process was pretty straightforward: our game designers had a pretty good idea of what they wanted Nessa to look like overall — so they expressed it in game design documentation (GDD) and passed it to the art team.
After studying the description of the character from the game designers, the artist starts to search for images, making black and white sketches with different ideas.
If the color is approximately laid down in the GDD or the artist has a vision of color at once, he can make the first sketches in color. In this case, we immediately had the right image and began to develop it.
At the next stage, we moved on to color schemes and searched for the basic colouring of the character.
If necessary, the artist makes additional angles and schemes in the concept so that the modeller would have fewer questions when creating a 3D image.
Once our concept is ready, we can hand it over to our 3D modellers for further work. At the first stage of modelling, blocking is done to outline the main masses and proportions of the future character.
Since this character is made not only for a game card, but also for an animated video, some stages of work are reversed. In this case, first the whole model is thoroughly worked out.
Next, we put her in a pose for the game card, set up the lighting and render. After that we add light, details to face and hair, and also additional colours. And there we have our Legendary Pilot Nessa Riggs.
But it doesn’t end here. In September, 2023, we added a new version of Nessa to War Robots — now she’s also a Legendary Titan Pilot.
Just as with regular Nessa, we started with sketches, trying to get the right mood for the character. Titans are bigger and more powerful than regular mechs, so we made Nessa more intimidating and cool looking in her new armour.
Next, we polished the details in the character's look and corrected small inaccuracies. For example, we moved the wrist computer to make it more practical from the character's perspective.
After that, we made a 3D model, put it in a pose and rendered it. All that’s left is to add some details.
There we have our finished Nessa — as a Lenedray Pilot and as a Legendary Titan Pilot. But… that’s not all. Titan Pilots in our game are special — they can move.
We made Nessa move using Spine animation. More on that in post's description!