Thread by @Gaohmee

Alright let’s play a little guessing game for non-devs:

Make a guess for me for how long you believe it takes to build a full 3D character from scratch for a game. Including concept, tools, pipeline, style development with existing standard software.
Make a wild guess.

I’ll let folks take guesses for a while and talk about the answer later.

Listen I love y’all but also 😅

Every dev in my mentions is having an existential crisis right now 😂

I’m cackling manically in my kitchen

I gotta go have a ton of meetings but I will answer as best as I can and with as much detail during lunch! Keep guessing :)

Oh god I walked away for 2 hours for meetings and this is a whole thing now wah!

I HAVE LUNCH NOW SO ARE YOU READY FOR THE REVEAL?

IT IS TIME! BUCKLE UP!
The shorthand answer to the question at hand is: It takes as long as the whole development cycle, meaning LITERAL YEARS.
But that would be an unsatisfying answer and I'm not gonna let you hanging, so I will take a stab at explaining it in more detail!

I gotta make some disclaimers here because of course:
Let's assume we're talking about making a regular AAA game protagonist without existing tools pipeline and a new IP. Full 3D, animated, rigged with multiple outfits and multiple weapon types.

Disclaimer continued: EVERY gamedev pipeline is different. They have similarities and some best practices, BUT in the end every team builds their own specific process and tools depending on a whole multitude of factors. I can not predict them all in this thread.

Ok, let's go.
Everything starts with concepting. Concepting is a multi-layered process that includes tone and game direction, but also artstyle, tech art and future-proofing your development. If you know that you'll need to be able to scale weapon types etc, you gotta accommodate

So concepting is NOT just concept art. It's all technical considerations as well. How to set up a character to be as versatile as possible. Concept art will go through dozens upon dozens of concepts while tech art and character art are working on lookdev.

Lookdev is a process that is about figuring out the look and feel of your character AND the technical long-term considerations. It includes things as detailed as HOW DOES THIS FABRIC FOLD and HOW DOES HAIR WORK and DO WE NEED FUR?
(I may have worked on a fur character once...)

Trust me, figuring out how FABRIC FOLDS seems minute, but it is not. On a game I worked on that is now canceled, the way we stylized fabric was literally a defining factor for our look. Games such as Sea of Thieves and Dauntless have probably had similar considerations.

Art can spend literal months only on these questions. Fabrics, hair, materials, what parts of your character moves aside from the limbs. Can we get away with one rig only or do we need more than one? If you don't know what rigs are: It's the "skeleton" that makes it move.

Rigs, my friends, are complicated as shit. "Bones" need to be implemented for everything that can move AND go through a skinning and weighting process which decides which part of the mesh move with which bones to what kind of degree. This takes MONTHS to YEARS to complete.

The goal of lookdev is all of the above but it's ALSO trying to figure out how to get a super early version into the game so design can get a sense for how a character moves. The early models that go into your game are dozens of versions away from a final one.

And IF you get close to a final version that was agreed upon by everyone all the way up to exec - every tiny piece of it - then you need to take care of alternative outfits, getting weapons to snap properly into your hands, timing and pacing of animations, blend-animations....

Blending animations is actually a total killer because design takes your character and has to make sure that it flows well. Animations between maneuvers have to flow well and blend between one another. Can you cancel animations? How does that work and what happens if you do?

Animations is A LOT MORE THAN JUST A RUN CYCLE AND SOME ATTACKS. We need to accommodate EVERY maneuver, every attack cancel, every terrain, every input from the player side. This is where design and art go back and forth a LOT and there are SO MANY REVISIONS. SO many.

Getting everything in is one thing, making it feel GOOD and flow well is a totally different beast. It takes a TON of specialization in this field to make this work. 3C designers are literal magical beings and together with char artists and tech artists, they make actual miracles

Let's not forget audio! Do you know how impossibly hard it is to make footsteps line up with animation and make that sound good? Especially when we're talking different speeds and animation sets. There are so so so many considerations to be made to make a character feel real.

All this, all this is a HUGE process of many many many people. You need a LOT more than just a character artist. You need a whole team to bring a character to your screens. With a lot of experience in this department a team can MAYBE do this in 2 years (with the above parameters)

But honestly, even that timeline is short. Some of your favourite characters out there took a lot longer. A LOT LONGER.

If you now add considerations on top of having to create A LINEUP OF CHARACTERS THAT CAN BE EXPANDED. Can you imagine the amount of parameters?

In those cases, the dev and pre-prod team is focused on the pipeline even more because suddenly your pipeline needs to be future-proofed for 10+ years to come, e.g. League of Legends or other character roster games. Again, I'm generalizing here, but still.

And let's not forget VFX. Reminder: VFX is part of EVERY character, not just the over-the-top-anime-style of swishy swords. Even your Nathan Drake needs VFX considerations to "feel" good. Often goes hand in hand with audio as well.

Communicating movement, snappiness, distress, danger, and so much more very often comes through the little touches that VFX does. Actual magic. A character without VFX always feels like something is missing.

Sometimes, if a specific feature is crucial to the feel of the game (say, Kratos throwing and catching his axe), a dev team can spend literal months on that feature feeling good alone. Throwing, recalling and catching the axe is a gigantic feature to develop feel good.

If you're working on a game that has a character lineup that needs to include non-bipedal creatures of some sort: I WILL PRAY FOR YOU EVERY DAY FOREVER BECAUSE OH GOD.
Trying to figure out a set of re-usable rigs to not kill yourself during production is impossibly hard.

Because, friends, we can NOT make games with multiple character or specifically creatures and make a new rig for each. Remember? LITERAL YEARS FOR A HERO CHARACTER. So here we are, trying to work out how to make a believable set of rigs that we can use for multiple characters.

The considerations are endlessly crippling because you're trying to plan ahead for a 3-5 year dev cycle and SOMETIMES beyond because you're trying to future-proof your technology and pipelines for games that might come AFTER the one you're making.

AND THEN WE HAVE NOT EVEN TALKED ABOUT FACIAL ANIMATIONS BECAUSE THAT SHIT IS IMPOSSIBLE!!

You might think: Oh, just mocap it and slap it on your rig. WELL NO SIR, IT'S NOT LIKE THAT. Mocap helps but it is not automatically less work. It just isn't.

Every mocapped animation still needs the touch of multiple devs to work in the game for a really long time. It needs a cleanup pass, it needs to be simplified, it needs to be normalized to fit a unified style across your characters that is included in the tone of your game.

AND NOW WE HAVE NOT TALKED ABOUT PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION, which, frankly, I know very little about because the people who do this are witches and I have no idea how they do it and also no game ever exists without them.

Cause a ZBrush sculpt of a character is one thing - a game-ready model is a whole other.
Zbrush is mostly used as a concepting tool but a Zbrush 3D model would have an INSANE number of polygons, which is not usable in-game for a whole lot of reasons beyond performance.

Perf optimization includes a LOT of magic and a LOT of tech art to not make your game run like a frickin potato. Every object needs to go through this process, including characters and all their effects and textures and everything.

Look.... this is a lot of info and let me tell you: I've shorthanded a LOT of it in this thread for the sake of making this more or less easy to understand for folks.

The answer to the original question really is this: It takes years for the characters you love to come to life. Years from MULTIPLE people, not just one. Whole teams work on these characters and the systems and pipelines that surround them.

Imagine playing jumping ropes but with 50 people for 3 years straight. The coordination, consideration, expertise involved in bringing you characters is extraordinary.
I know a lot of your guesses were a lot shorter and I'm not making fun of you for that. It's hard to understand

But maybe next time you play a game and you find a character you love, you think of this thread and the fun we've had in the replies and I hope you smile and get to appreciate the hard work that so many people put into it. It's pure labour of love and some serious grit.

And to you, my darling fellow gamedevs:
I adore you and I adore your work. I know the replies have given y'all heartburn and I get that :D
But hopefully we've learned a little bit today and I hope you all enjoyed this silly little exercise :)

I hope you can all scrape your soul back up that has left your body after reading all this haha

PS: If you feel sad about your estimate being way off, especially if you didn't know all parameters: FEAR NOT.
That was part of the point ;) There are a LOT more parts involved in what we do that you can imagine.