作者：Gauss

今天让我们来讨论《求生之路2》的角色设计的视觉清晰度。在最近几年Valve关于这方面的学习取得了进一步的发展，所以我们有必要去剖析他们所获取的经验教训。

让我们带着背景，并考虑三个主要元素：轮廓/规模，颜色/模式以及材料/细节。

Left-4-Dead-1-Old-New-Comparison（from blogspot）

上图是修改前和修改后的《求生之路》中的幸存者（在Turtle Rock Studios被Valve所收购之后）。

Valve在视觉上的大胆尝试可以追溯到《半条命2》。但是《半条命2》更突出的还是让人印象深刻的角色，而非本文所讨论的主题，即这是一款带有非常友好的非玩家角色的单人游戏，区别于团体协作的多人游戏。

从实际意义上来看，我指的是那些将为游戏玩法带来实际影响的元素。对此我们需要着眼于《军团要塞2》。

玩家应该还记得，最初的《军团要塞2》（大约在1998年）是基于更现实的视觉效果和游戏玩法。（如图）

team-fortress-2（from blogspot）

但是在游戏的开发过程中却出现了许多不同游戏的冲击，最显著的便是《战地》系列游戏。

最终开发者彻底修改了《军团要塞2》，即变成一款接近于《Quake》但却带有倾向于20世纪经典商业插画的干净且具有风格的游戏。

我们可以从中看出Moby Francke独特的视觉风格，而从局外人的角度来看，《军团要塞2》拥有强大的艺术性视觉效果。（当然了，角色设计朝着视觉清晰度发展还归功于其他设计师，但从Francke的作品来看，我认为他是该公司中最杰出的设计师。）

在致力于《军团要塞2》之前，他创造了《反恐精英：起源》的造型表（如图）。

model sheets（from blogspot）

尽管角色设计主要是由《反恐精英》的mod版本所决定，但却也不能忽视造型表本身的呈现。主要的形状和轮廓深受细节或纹理的影响。

这是主导着《军团要塞2》成功的一大理念：清楚，整洁的外观。《反恐精英：起源》的造型与《反恐精英》最初的角色并没有太大的区别，但它们却是经过反复完善才最终变成我们所看到的《军团要塞2》。

下图便是Moby Francke为《军团要塞2》所设计的一个角色。虽然呈现出的是与《反馈精英：起源》一样的造型表，但是基于游戏风格，《军团要塞2》的角色具有更显著的轮廓。让我们进一步讨论《军团要塞2》的各种角色设置。

character design（from blogspot）

轮廓/大小

甚至一些休闲玩家也知道轮廓设计问题。这是设计任何电子角色时所需要掌握的最重要的元素。你是否能够只依靠轮廓便判断出下面的角色？

关于《军团要塞2》，Valve意识到如果能让玩家更快速明确其他角色并明确相关信息（游戏邦住：对方是敌还是友，或者属于何种类别），那么玩家便会更加重视游戏。基于团队的竞争性多人硬核游戏的需求不仅推动着《军团要塞2》的视觉效果变得更加吸引人，同时也将游戏玩法的需求透明化了。这种透明化也经过完善再次出现于《求生之路1》和《求生之路2》中。

我们可以将角色设计放置在一个跨越了自然化（如《求生之路》）到风格化再到抽象化（如《太空入侵者》）的范围中。虽然从名义上看这些角色都属于人类，但是他们的轮廓却大相径庭。更加风格化的游戏总是能够提供更大的空间让玩家去定制角色的轮廓。

Scott McCloud的漫画《Understanding Comics》便呈现出了“画报词汇”这一理念——既能用于电子游戏中也适用于漫画中。

McCloud-comic-vocabulary（from blogspot）

当游戏变得更加抽象或者更加倾向于图中三角形的右边时，轮廓间的差异性便能更清楚地呈现出来。游戏机制同样也将进行追踪，尽管它不具备多大的关联性（还有许多游戏带有现实的图像以及更加抽象的机制和世界）。

即最开始人类是以正常人类的轮廓而出现，我们需要思考他所传达的各种不同信息—-高度，重量，性别，年龄等；形状间的关系（持有武器可能呈现出独特的轮廓），角色最常见的姿势，动画风格等等。因为轮廓是能够帮助玩家识别角色的最重要元素之一，所以我们必须确保轮廓能够清楚地呈现出来，或者与背景分离开来。

值得注意的是，在《求生之路》中，轮廓也能传达一些重要的信息，如角色受重伤—-当角色的生命值较低时，他便会通过弯腰，蹒跚行走等形式表现出来。

轮廓其实也等同于大小。即轮廓既能帮助玩家识别角色，同时也能呈现出角色的各种大小，如此角色的可读性也就大大提高了。在《求生之路》中，所有角色都具有可读性的大小/轮廓，如此不同角色便能够被有效地区分开来。

颜色/模式

这是最缺少关注的优秀视觉角色设计的一大元素。关于颜色和模式的清楚且简单的应用能够帮助我们有效地区分不同的角色—-从这点看来《求生之路》的角色设计真的很突出。

让我们着眼于《求生之路1》和《求生之路2》的角色理念，然后考虑其配色方案，通过将所有元素应用到相同的迷你人型（如模版）中而进行颜色区分。熟悉这些角色的玩家都能清楚地说出他们八个人的名字：

基于不同配置的简单且强大的颜色组合将创造出让人印象深刻且能够轻松分辨出来的角色，这对于功能角色设计至关重要。

材料/细节

材料和细节是最难进行说明的元素，但对于整体呈现来说仍然至关重要。适当的材料选择（闪闪发光的盔甲或者武器vs.喷砂面）非常有帮助，特别是当玩家未能获得其它有效信息时。

微弱的光线将导致玩家很难分辨出颜色，并只能依靠轮廓进行判断。而一些特别的反光材质也具有可读性（比起那些低光度材质而言）。（这也是为什么现实世界的武器会强调消光处理以及磷化处理的主要原因，以确保武器不会在黑暗中显现出来。）

glow-y位体是我们能够有效支持电子游戏角色设计的秘密武器。多亏了glow-y位体，不管是Sam Fisher（游戏邦住：《细胞分裂》中的主要角色）还是Marcus Fenix（《战争机器》中的主要角色）都能在黑暗的中轻松地前行。不管你的动力装甲是缺少冲击力还是清晰度，发光的技术位体都能够帮助你有效地将其呈现出来。

细节是关于其它元素的全方位描述，即包括角色的整体视觉复杂性。同时我们也需要仔细考虑游戏的整体复杂性，以及这与游戏玩法之间的关系。

Marcus Fenix以及其他《战争机器》中的COG便是非常典型的例子：只要有效部署一定的技巧，并结合一些显著元素，如glow-y位体，我们便能够将游戏角色有效地呈现在玩家面前。

但却不是人人都能做到这一点，就像《虚幻竞技场3》虽然拥有与《战争武器》类似的图像，但却未能呈现出有效的视觉设计。在团队游戏中，我们需要使用一块红色或蓝色的外壳去覆盖远处的角色和车辆，从而确保玩家能够更快速地察觉到它们。

原文发表于2009年11月9日，所涉事件和数据均以当时为准。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part I)

With the release of Left 4 Dead 2 coming up, let’s talk about visual clarity in character design. Valve has learned quite a bit about doing it right in recent years, so it’s worth dissecting a few of the lessons they’ve learned.

We’ll start with some background, and then cover three main concerns: silhouette/scale, color/patterns, and materials/detailing. In another update, we’ll apply these lessons to less than successful character designs in another existing game and see what we come up with.

The L4D Survivors before and after major reworking, after Turtle Rock Studios’ absorption into Valve proper.

Valve’s visual bravura arguably dates to Half-Life 2. But HL2 was more of a breakthrough in terms of memorably drawn characters, rather than a variety of pragmatic concerns we’ll be discussing here–a single player game with invincible/high health friendly NPCs is not the same as designing for team/co-op multiplayer.

By pragmatic, I mean the kinds of things that have a direct impact on gameplay. For this, we’ll look at Team Fortress 2.

Players may remember that TF2 was originally–circa 1998 or so–going for a more realistic visual and gameplay style (seen at left).

Thankfully while in development, in they were soundly swooped by a number of different games, most notably the Battlefield series of games.

TF2 was ultimately redesigned closer to the original Quake mod roots of the game, but with a clean, stylized look harkening to the work of classic 20th century commercial illustrators.

We see the particular stamp of Moby Francke’s visual style, which from an outsider’s perspective seems to be the strongest artistic voice on where TF2 would end up, visually. (I have no doubt this greater movement toward visual clarity in character designs was due to others artists as well, but Francke’s work seems the single best artist at the company I can point to.)

Prior to his work on TF2, witness his Counter-Strike: Source model sheets (below and to the right).

While the character designs had already been more or less decided with the mod version of Counter-Strike, notice the presentation of the model sheet itself. Major shapes and silhouettes are emphasized over detailing or texture.

This is a crucial concept governing much of the successfulness of TF2: a clean, uncluttered, “readable” look. The CS:S models are not hugely different from the original CS characters, but they are an iterative improvement and a step toward what would become TF2.

Below, one of Moby Francke’s character designs for TF2. Same presentation for the model sheets as for CS:S, but with the style of the game he’s able to work in more memorable silhouettes. Simply by considering the various TF2 characters with relation to each other you can reverse-engineer most of these lessons–but let’s talk about them more in detail.

Silhouette/Scale

Even some of the most casual players are probably aware of silhouette design issues. This is perhaps the single most important factor when designing any videogame character. Look below–do you have trouble identifying any of the characters below solely by their silhouettes?

With TF2, Valve realized that the more quickly the player needs to identify other characters and act on that information (friend or foe, what class the other player is) the more important it becomes. The demands of a hardcore, team-based competitive multiplayer game helped drive the visual style for TF2 to not only be attractive, but also transparent to the needs of the gameplay. This transparency would be honed and show up again with L4D 1 and 2.

Character designs can be placed on a spectrum from the naturalistic (L4D) to stylized, to the almost completely abstract (say, Space Invaders). Above, these characters are all nominally human, but their silhouettes vary wildly. The more stylized the game, generally the more wiggle room you’ll have to play with in terms of defining through silhouette.

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has a very useful lens to consider this concept–the “Pictorial Vocabulary”–that applies equally as well to videogames as it does to comics. (A more detailed version with examples of this is available here.)

As games become more abstracted either up or to the right of this triangle, the more dramatic the differences in silhouette (may) become. Game mechanics tend to track similarly, though it is not strictly correlated. (There are a lot of games with somewhat realistic graphics but highly abstract mechanics and world.)

Start with a normal human silhouette, think about the various different messages it sends–height, weight, gender, age; the interrelations of shapes (held weapons also count a lot for unique silhouette), the character’s most common postures, style of animation, etc. Silhouette is one of the most identifying factors so long as the character in question is not significantly occluded visually, or they can be clearly discerned from the background.

It’s worth noting that for L4D, silhouette will also communicate important information like being gravely wounded–once a player has very low health they transition to the stooped, wounded stagger in place of a normal gait.

The natural corollary to silhouette is scale. A silhouette may identify a character well, but introduced together with scale variation, a character’s readability is boosted considerably. With L4D, all characters are realistically scaled/silhouetted human characters (no giants, no dwarves, and no spikey anime hair) and yet the characters are all well differentiated on these grounds.

Color/Patterns

This is one of the least appreciated aspects of good visual character design. Clear, simplified application of color and pattern can be one of the best ways to create well differentiated characters–and it is here that arguably the L4D character designs are strongest.

Let’s look at character concepts for both L4D1 and L4D2. Then consider the color schemes, divorced from all other aspects besides color by applying them to the same Lego minifigure-like template. Players familiar with them will have no trouble naming all 8 characters:

Simple, strong combinations of colors in different arrangements can by themselves create memorable, easily differentiated characters that can be IDed by the player under duress reliably, which is the holy grail for functional character design.

Materials/Detailing

Out of all concerns, materials and detailing are some of the most difficult to explicate, but still crucial to overall presentation. Material choice–say, a glistening bright shine on armor or a weapon vs. a matte finish–can go a long way, especially when other information isn’t available to the player.

Extremely low-light conditions will strip players of color information, leaving only silhouette cues and in many cases not even that. Extremely reflective materials, on the other hand, will still “read” differently than matte ones in low light. (Which is part of why most real-world military firearms feature some manner of matte finishing, parkerizing and the like–so they won’t reflect sharply in the dark.)

The associated problems here are why we’ve got the single biggest crutch for videogame character design: glow-y bits. Everyone from Sam Fisher to Marcus Fenix can orient themselves easily in a pitch-dark room, thanks to gratuitous glow-y bits. Your future power armor design lacking that necessary punch, or clarity? Glowing tech-bits are every lazy s.f. concept artist’s best friend.

The slippery slope.

Detailing is a sort of catch-all description for other concerns too numerous for the scope of this article, including the overall visual complexity of a character. As such it should be considered carefully, as should the overall visual complexity of your game, as it relates to your gameplay.

Marcus Fenix and the other COGs in Gears of War are deceptive cases: with careful deployment of certain techniques, in combination with more overt ones such as glow-y bits, you can still maintain fairly good legibility–even if tastefulness remains elusive.

Color-overlay shaders reveal a breakdown of basic visual clarity in UT3.

But it can be tricky–Gears of Wars’ near sibling Unreal Tournament 3, despite a very similar aesthetic, fails almost completely in terms of clarity of visual design. Busy, techy character designs against busy, techy backgrounds mean that in team games, characters and vehicles (!) at mid-to-long distances are overlayed with a red or blue shader shell, in order that they’re readily perceptible at all.

I apologize if some of these concepts aren’t fully explained, but with Part II we’ll be applying all the lessons to some existing designs in another game. In the meantime–what are your favorite examples of visually successful and spectacularly unsuccessful visual designs for videogame characters?(source:blogspot)