[BLOG] The Creation of Billie

Let's talk about the creation of our special little goat Billie! She was originally created for the UE4 game jam "Spring into action". We wanted to make a 3D platformer and wanted a character that would work with the games theme. Originally we planned to use a rabbit or jackalope but fearing that other contest entries would also go down this path we went with a more unusual choice, a goat! Goats definitely fit "springy" as they're often quite jumpy and known for their mischief. 

Thus Billie was born, originally looking more like a cow and slightly more block-y

Billie still had her signature bell, overly large ears and 2D eyes. She was rushed quickly due to the game jam deadline only being in 3 days. I usually worked as an environment artist also so I was clueless when it came to modelling a character.  

We didn't win the game jam, but we had so much fun working on the game compared to our old horror game Relapse we decided to pursue it further but I disliked Billie's current model, she could not emote and had this flat blank stare. I gave her 2D eyes because I found it quicker than making a functioning 3D face so I wanted to update her model to look more like a goat and less like a cow and include 3D facial features.

However, despite being proud of the new Billie and spending weeks reworking her, the audience disagreed. Showing her off on Twitter she was received poorly and was criticised for being creepy. I knew I had gone wrong when close friends and family told me that they preferred her old model! They said they missed her long ears and 2D eyes. Back to the drawing board I guess. Lesson learnt I decided to concept out her design first before I spent weeks on a 3D model that would never be used.

This was around the same time as Oscar's creation, you'll see how his design here differs from his current one. Planning out Billie this way was a lot easier and only took a few hours compared to a few weeks. 

I had a good reception to this new design so I took her into zbrush and started to trace the character. Her ears, horns and hair are all attached via sockets in Unreal Engine 4 to allow for other variations of goats to be made using the same base and animations. 

Originally Billie had sculpted cheek fluff but this was later removed. Despite having a clear guide it was still hard imagining her in 3D. I had a lot of help from friends who would redline her model for me. 

One of the hardest parts was trying to get the 2D eyes to fit nicely onto the face without too much distortion. Once her 3D model was ready her low poly was made in topogun. However, I faced one big problem, how would I get her eyes to work and animate?

My first big problem was how I would overlay her eyes on top of her face, we started off by using a cylinder that curved around her head, but you could see how her eyes were almost floating about it, the solution was to duplicate her face geometry so it would follow the curves of her face.

The next big problem was how do I get her face to actually animate in game? I tried using flipbooks first which allowed the character to blink nonstop. This is where Luke stepped in and came up with a much more elegant method.

Instead of flipbooks the character now changes its diffuse texture using a material instance. The material is then controlled using bone rotations.

There are bone controllers for the pupil position (which is controlled using a UV offest), the mouth shape and the eye shape. It's also fairly easy to add new expressions. Now animation from Maya can be directly imported and work in UE4 without any further work.

And that's how Billie came to be! She's had a few redesigns since then to simplify and improve on her design. As I grow as an artist I learn more and want to rework old models. Unfortunately that would require rerigging and animation so Billie's model will stay the same, but here's a look at her plush design to show her most recent changes. I adjusted her colour palette to stand out more and show off her white chest, darkened her eye colour and given her small white hearts under her feet to add an extra dose of cute to her design.

She may change more in the future but only in terms of colour palette or changes that would only require a simple re-texture.