Designing and modeling Nier: Automata's android protagonist

Nier: Automata character modeler Hito Matsudaira has taken to the official PlayStation blog to explain how he brought the game's protagonist, 2B, to life. 

It's an interesting read complete with plenty of detailed diagrams and instructions revealing how Matsudaira turned 2B from a hand drawn concept to a fully-realized playable character. 

As the modeler himself notes, "the process isn’t as simple as changing an illustration into 3D." It requires careful consideration and months of hard work. 

Matsudaira had to consider how his design would impact the animation team, how many bones the character would have, how its movable parts would be controlled, and even the cost associated with mass production -- and that was all while he was creating the rough model. 

"In basic terms, the process involves pasting the images onto polygons, but the number of polygons and images increase each time a new generation console is released," writes Matsudaira, explaining how he took that rough model and turned it into the one you see in-game (shown below). 

"The polygon count for the PS2 was a few thousand, so only one to two types of images were necessary. However, the polygon count for the PS4 is approximately 100,000 and it needs about eight types of images. You’ll also need more than that if you want something more detailed. 

"Here's how it works. I take the raw polygon, add images with surface contour information extracted from the high quality model, designate textures using different types of images, designate color information using images, use one last bit of creativity to bring out the texture of the model, and boom! The model is finished."

You can find out more about the process over on the official PlayStation blog.