I stumbled across the second part of a series of chats with Jim Lee over at the European Playstation stie. I thought I would share some of it with you and drop you the link to go check out the rest.
How have you approached the design of each of the main villains and heroes from the DC Universe?
On an individual character level we tried to make each costume and character look as cool as possible but not to change them to the point where they no longer looked identifiable. It really is the same thinking I apply to any character I draw when I have to draw them for the first time in a comic book story.
At the end of the day, I had to make a ton of creative choices as to which costumes from which eras were the most classic. I also gave Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) direction and information about what material the costumes were made of; what exact colour shades comprised Batman and Superman’s costumes for example.
We took some liberties here and there but less so with the most iconic ones. There are certain costumes that don’t work as well in a 3D virtual space and we also wanted to make sure that all the characters could line up and look consistent next to one another. In other words, that they all belonged in the same unified universe.
What do you think is the most difficult thing to capture when transferring DC Comics characters from the page to a videogame screen?
A lot of the stuff that works in comic books works because you choose the angle and can add lighting effects and things like that. In the massively multiplayer online action game (MMOAG) space we don’t have those same kinds of controls. Characters have to look great from all angles. A lot of the times we’ll draw a side view that’s a lot different from the front, three-quarter view. In the virtual world, there’s a lot less room to fudge things. A lot of time was spent early on sharing the art style with the entire art team so they began to internalise it.
Every artist has their own natural signature that shapes, in very subtle ways, the myriad of creative decisions they make on a millisecond by millisecond basis to create a drawing or a 3D asset. We spent a lot of one-on-one time refining these decisions, making very subtle changes to things like eyebrows, noses, lips, hair styles etc. It really was a fascinating way of working collaboratively with so many talented artists, each of whom had their own natural styles.
Head over to the European Playstation Site for the rest of this part and for Game Talk: Creating DC Universe Online – part one
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