Character Art - Projekt Melody - Lewd History

This post is going to feature descriptions and pictures from our character artist Krisu. 

There will be editorial commentary like this to expand on what he had to share or add further context where needed. We hope you enjoy reading through some uncensored history of the development of our game´s Projekt Melody.

1. Melody´s Design - Where we started!

Krisu: "At the start there wasn't an exact blueprint to follow for the final design, we had ideas of where we wanted to aim. This Melody was created with the idea of being a Unreal Engine Mel pushing a lil more the character to new horizons, a mix of stylized + human + anime. Our version of Melody for the game. So I did a mix between all the ideas."

The pictures above are a mix between concept art created for Projekt Melody herself (Picture Row 1), Concept Art created for the game itself (Picture Row 2) and Reference Pictures we gathered from Videos on Bilibili.com and Youtube.com (Picture Row 3 &4).

2. First 3D Iterations

Krisu: "The new Mel came up, there were differences on the clothing as you can see on the hoodie nips between designs. We tried different styles of iris, eye sclera, blendshapes for arkit / oculus / vrc / etc etc ... and a lot more. I didn't like so much the hair so i gave her wavy style."

The last picture row depicts a list of all blendshapes we documented for the in games first 3D version. Blendshapes are also known as shapekeys or morphtargets and deform the shape of a 3D model. Blendshapes can be mixed and can help a lot but also destroy a lot, depending on how they are being used.

3. Trailer and Release Preparations

Krisu: "After all the testing we kept working on her final look still long way to go since we didnt even reached the trailer phase. Shading evolved lot long the way so we could adapt to many things, even so, this shader it is not  flat shading so its wild sometimes.

The character base pose was adapted to “a pose” instead of “t pose” since on games is easier to animate this way while muscles are relaxed."

The exact name that we call our pose internally is the so called "hug pose" or "h-pose". It is derived from a mix between the well known "a pose" and the less known "motorcycle pose" that is often used in AAA productions to get the best start position for muscle deformation.

3.1 Reverse Engineering 3D to 2D Concept Art

As you might know from past development blogs we have had a ton of iterations on most of our characters so far. That also meant we worked with many concept artists. With Melody though, at some point we even tried to reverse engineer our 3D look into a 2D concept art in order to create a better foundation for future character concept. You can see the result in the following image:

4. Ultimate Re-Melware Iterations

Krisu: "After having the Mel base we had this design of Melware, so i adapted it to the current base body we had for it."

Krisu: "After finishing it, it didn't feel she was the Melware I felt she should be, since she looked more like a maiden. So we approached Projekt Melody with a new idea I had."

Krisu: "After some of her feedback and some research, new Melware was born, I called her Re-Melware. I felt she should be more shady and tried to help her escape from looking too similar to Melody, in order to give her more personality while she is in control."

5. First Release

Krisu: "After lot of work to make things on time, lot of testing, little sleep hours, etc etc etc, we finally released the trailer. And soon after that we provided the first build to play around with the character. New Mel was well received but we also got questions about why we didn't use original Mel."

6. One Step back, two steps forward - the Game Dev Dance!

Krisu: "Mel came with the idea of using her OG for the game so we could provide what it was requested."

By then the leadership team had been discussing for some time, how to get more fans engaged with the games development. We really liked Melody at this point already and wondered how to push the limit even further.

Melody eventually pointed out that we could try and use her OG character. We really liked that idea and decided to try and take on the challenge!

7. How to be Steam & Unreal Friendly!

Krisu: "To be Unreal friendly we needed some extra centimetres. But only getting taller is not what makes you steam friendly, so her proportions also needed to be adjusted."

In Picture Row 1 you can see from left to right: Melody Original, Melody Height Adjusted (for Unreal) & Melody Body Shape Adjusted.

Picture Row 2 shows the difference between OG and Adjusted head shapes.

Krisu: "New OG Mel was born, but she didn't really fit into the world ..."

7. !!! - TECH TALK - !!!

We tried using flat shading or the so called NPR rendering as our first adjustment back when we brought "New OG Mel" into our newly set up Unreal Engine 5 project.

Unreal Engine 5 isn't very well equipped when it comes to NPR rendering.

To get to a good level of control, we would have needed to create so called "source" builds. These would have adjusted code or programming for the way frames and pictures are rendered. That wouldn't only have over-scoped our currently available production framework, but also increased issues with getting future updates for the currently "semi" stable first release of Unreal Engine 5.

The other option was "Post Process" based NPR rendering.

NPR = Non Photo Realistic

In Layman's Terms, you can imagine a Post Process to be like a runtime version of Photoshop - with added functionality. 

It's pixel based, can be relatively expensive in terms of performance and the results are derived mostly from the engines 2D rendering results. The following picture shows different types of information with some of them being accessible by a post process operation.

NPR rendering without major adjustments through game logic, usually results in very bright and distinctive character rendering. The examples below over-exaggerate this. Nevertheless you can try and imagine, that especially dark and shadowed scenes can become a huge headache to create. 

NPR also created issue through its effect on how shadows are being cast on characters. 

NPR relies often on cell shading, which in turn needs 3D models with fairly specific topology and surface requirements. If the model does not 100% fulfil the required surface shapes, shadows are going to start looking wonky from certain angles.

After around 2-3 weeks of testing NPR, the team got together, recapped on the technical difficulties and decided that our best visual choice would be to continue using our original character shading and expand on that rendering style instead.

8. Adapting New OG Mel to our unique Style

Krisu: "We decided to adapt her to our universe, so we needed to re adjust lot of things on the shader."

9. Closing Words

At the time we are doing another pass on Melody in order to remove the "uncanny valley" feeling we and many patrons had in the latest build. You can look forward to the next few builds, to keep seeing her evolve.

Thank you all so much for your continued support! 

We hope you enjoyed this little adventure into the history of "A nut between Worlds" Projekt Melody!

With the words of Krisu, our character artist:

"This is how I feel now, the Melverse keeps expanding."