In this week’s production process blog, we’re exploring what went into our meticulous recreation of Beth Harmon in The Queen's Gambit Chess, and how the Rockwater Art Team's dedication to bringing her to life for the mobile platform was founded on authenticity and innovation.
Initial Inspiration: Dan Eder's Artistry
Dan Eder played a pivotal role in turning the vision of Beth Harmon into a reality. As mentioned in our previous Character Overview post, it was Dan’s gorgeous initial fan art that resonated so strongly with the art team that we got in touch to collaborate.
Once he joined the project as Lead Character Artist, Dan’s expertise in character creation ensured that every nuance of Beth's persona was captured in fine detail. For an in-depth look at his creative process, be sure to check out his speed modelling tutorial of that initial Beth Harmon design:
Dan's Speed Modelling Tutorial
Visualizing Beth Harmon
That initial design fitted perfectly with the art style we were developing for The Queen’s Gambit Chess. From here, it was a case of iterating and refining until we reached something unanimously adored.
The renders throughout this article provide a glimpse of the intricate work that goes into the creation of a character in the Queens Gambit Chess. We will also go a few steps beyond the character as an isolated element and talk about how that model was set up in Unreal and the overall pipeline created.
Our Unreal Character Render Pipeline
We always knew that characters would be incredibly important given their role in the game, but high quality characters on mobile platforms come at a high cost. So our main question became "How do we get AAA quality, stylised characters onto mobile?".
With this in mind an entirely separate Unreal project was set up to be used solely for rendering characters at high quality. Highly advanced Video compression would then be used to bake down the individual frames into movies which were then brought back into the game project and triggered through our state machine.
This approach freed us completely from constraints in texture sizes, bone counts and other large data assets. It also opened the door for techniques that are traditionally not performant on mobile; It allowed us to use advance skin shaders, subsurface scattering, grooms and ray-traced shadows to name a few.
Technically it would have been possible to create this system within the main game project, however it would cause unnecessary bloat to the data. Separation meant that Artists could work entirely independently and throw absolutely everything at the engine without introducing risk to other parts of development. It was also very handy to have a render oriented project for Marketing assets and other areas of the game where high quality renders are required, such as the front end, unlocks etc. 
Techniques to Master the Aesthetics
Now that we had a method that freed us from the traditional mobile constraints, we could focus on how to get the best our of each pixel. As mentioned above we took advantage of sophisticated Subsurface Scattering (SSS) shaders, we rigged the hair so it reacted correctly to head movements, we even made grooms for the fuzzy items in game such as Beth's white coat and Mr. Shaibel's thick jumper. Every strand of hair, every glimmer in her eyes, and every contour of her expression was meticulously designed to resonate with players and maintain the visual integrity of the character.
Crafting Animated Frames
The animation of the characters in the Queens Gambit Chess was a really fun part of production which involved a unique batch render queue setup.
After the mocap had been cleaned, every animation for each character was set up within a hierarchy of sequences which in turn could be triggered using a variety of render queues. In short this meant any animation for any character (or batch of characters/animations) could be re-rendered quickly with minimal effort, this could also have been triggered remotely or offloaded to a render farm if the needs of the project were more demanding.
Implementing this process did require meticulous attention to detail; ensuring that every frame was consistent and of exceptional quality but the time saving and results we feel are well worth it.
Insights from the Programming Team
Realising a character artistically, while a challenge, is only a part of it. Paul Hughes, Rockwater's Head of Programming, was essential in establishing the animation pipeline and helped to optimise Beth's animation frames while maintaining their visual fidelity. We'll go into this in more detail in a future article where we discuss how Unreal can be leveraged efficiently for use on mobile devices.
Up Next on Ripstone’s ArtStation
Thanks again for joining us on the Ripstone ArtStation! If you've enjoyed this exploration of how we recreated Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit Chess, be sure to delve into our previous articles to discover more behind-the-scenes insights:
- The Queen’s Gambit Chess: Character Overview
- The Queen’s Gambit Chess: Environment Overview
- The Queen’s Gambit Chess: Dan Eder Q&A
Join us next week for an exclusive article on another pivotal environment from the game; Alma's House!