"Photo-realistic" quality rendering between Unity and Unreal 4

Kudos to 3D character artists , environment artists, and the tech artists.
They have their own optimisation tools and they create their own 3D engine.

Because this is how works AAA , always trying to make better than before, take a look at Witcher 3 also.

 

pretty sure you totally misunderstood. It goes well beyond engine tech AND well beyond art. The amount of design planning and testing and feedback and iteration to get something working like that, as well as envisioning it is a huge task, and you need to be really smart to do it and have a lot of people NOT using the engine and NOT developing art.

It's that thinking that made this good, not the engine or art. And that, nobody can help anyone with. It's easy to shift the point of interest to art and engine as that's the first thing you see.

/OT

 

I know it goes beyond tech and 3D art.

The 3D art is big quality ; specially characters that looks lot more detailled than any other today game. Also the motion capture is just really good. Without good level design, lightening and 3D art and textures so great the game wold not look so good.
You can't denigrate 3D art and 3D motion, because if you have the best 3D engine and you can't pull a good level design, astonishing characters, amazing textures and materials and great gameplay, the engine is useless on your hands.
This is a whole package not only 3D art and not only 3D engine.

 

I've been working on some tutorial scenes, really simple stuff. Like... really simple.

Looking at that Farcry 4 scene with the car chase... the logistics required to put that sequence together are just staggering.

The production effort that went into that sequence will dwarf most games, and I'm not talking about the environmental assets, the animation, the physics, the locomotion system, lighting, etc. Just the stuff built or arranged specifically for that sequence.

How do you even go about beginning to plan something like that?

 

Well, I put together something like a procedural city generator. Start marking location paths, animations and a slurry of other components. It's a trick within itself to make something feel open yet make it linear, it's not particularily difficult to plan and make happen. It's just the time invested in making it look and feel right, like you could spend six months on a scene like that and it's like 0.01% of the entire game..

 

I think once you start moving on from graphics and content creation, you see that making it all work (what if player took this route? what if player didn't look over there), is staggering.

And making it work is 50% of the battle. The other 50% is making it fun at the same time. And that's just design.

The Uncharted 4 sequence is the most impressive unbroken slice of cinematic gameplay I've ever seen.

 

I had to rewatch it a couple times, I couldn't believe it wasn't on rails.

 

It'd be good to find out what tools they used to make that easier to pull off without huge draw calls, poly counts and artist $$$. Lots of modular pieces, good quality procedural mesh destruction, etc? What kind of level editing tools?

Here's a pic of Uncharted 3 (I think) showing some of the ways modular assets were re-used. You can see re-used building pieces by color.



The thread about it is here.

Here's a thread by some guys who worked on modular kits for Skyrim. Only 2 people were responsible for making all the dungeon content in that game in the form of kits, and only eight people were responsible for kitbashing all of the dungeons in that game.

Here's a thread by one of the artists on Mass Effect 3 about a massive level that was created with pretty much 1 texture.

Planning scene(s) like that of course will always take massive artistic (or should I say movie directing?) talent. Of course everything else does too, but I'm guessing that a lot of people would be surprised at how little work went into it art creation RELATIVE to the incredibly immense size of the scene. The AAA studios know how to re-use models, textures and cut corners like it's nothing. In fact in this day and age I imagine that it is more important to be a good artist 'technically' than it is to be outstanding in quality.

 

Hehe true, but perhaps the question would be how long will that trend last? At certain point the games will get so much technology in that from realism point of view gap will be closing between AAA and indie, only the size will remain the difference. Or perhaps i am just guessing, who knows.

 

I dont think that this scene is by any means example of heavy reuse of assets. Sure they pop here and there, but that is still large amount of unique assets. Go trough whole 15 minute demo and you will count massive amount of assets just for 10 minute of gameplay! Heh.
On great reuse of assets Mass effect would be good example. Their scenes had large reuse (textures especially), i hadnt felt dullness in any part of game due to that at all, but then again i might be biased becouse i like that game too much.

 

It will always be a big gap between 100-200 man working in a game and 1 to 10 man indie team.

 

Actually I saw plenty, but composition (which takes a lot of talent) can give the impression of unique character. In that thread I posted on Uncharted 3, one of the artists said "Pretty much everything is modular" not sure if he was referring to a level in particular or the whole game. I can't imagine they dropped all of that for no. 4.

That's for sure. I'm not saying it would be easy to make that scene, or that a few indie's could do it in a reasonable amount of time, but studios like to save money and time too, and we can always learn a lot from artists who share a bit of knowledge on how to do it.

There's no doubt that big-budget studios will always be ahead, but think of all the ways that we can approach it? MGS 5 used software that scans objects and turns them into useable polys, they use it on anything from actors to props. OK, this equipment cost massive $$$, but the point is, with that technology, the time spent on the asset creation is MASSIVELY reduced. That's where indies could use a little bit of innovation.

 

Not saying this is true, but let's just imagine for a second.

• Let's imagine that Naughty Dog made a great procedural building generator that used modular pieces made by the artists? I'm making a little prototype myself right now, it's hard to make technically but once it is done, life will be easy.
  
• Let's imagine that they created a procedural building placement tool and market stall placement tool, where you can mark paths and distances between them and so on, sort of like @ShadowK referred to?
  
• Let's imagine that they used World Machine to make all of the terrain (which you hardly ever see anyway under all the objects)?
• Let's imagine that they developed a procedural IK system for npc reactions when you bump into them?
• Let's imagine that they have a great procedural mesh destruction tool for all of those exploding tomatos?
• Let's imagine that they developed a good tool for sampling textures to drive particle effects (tire spurts) and the dirt on Nate's clothes?
  
• Let's imagine they re-used textures and meshes like there's no tomorrow?

Some of these are almost certainly wrong, or were only used partially, but you can see that there are some tools that you can develop to cut down your workload A LOT.

 

I doubt you got optimized polygons if you scan a simple box for example. They have done retopology on top of the scanned models.
Anyways, what about quality motion capture and game inetgration ? actors voice and actors motion capture contracts ? big level design ? thousand of assets and textures ? tech artists tools and shaders ? etc ...
You as indie can't just catch the whole game.

Procedural will look procedural and never like a town build by human hands with unique details and unique walls.
Anyway AC used a tool to create quickly building by hand, it was a helper tool , not a generator so you keep unique hand touch and you gain a big speed because it can generates unique buildings in some clicks using a library of texture and building parts.

About tools like many studios they develop their own tools for their own needs. With Unity you should be part of a team and have a guy developing tools also.

 

You guys are really missing the point.

You could replace every polygon and texture in that scene with cubes and default diffuse and it would still be out of indie reach.

 

Yup I was chatting to Sony about this a week or so ago, there's no real point to indie even trying to do that. We should be following different paths to greatness.

In a way, I like that! I love being able to sit down in front of something so spectacular that I couldn't do it. And just enjoy it.

In any case the reason people aren't 'getting it' in this thread is because they haven't really got far enough in their games to realise the ground truth that even if you strip it away to cubes, there's this few years worth of functional game design to get over.

 

Really? I think it could get pretty close, especially if you had an 360 degree array of laser scanning sensors and some decent software. Sure they probably tweaked things a little, but I doubt it was as you might imagine.

It probably is, but not as far as it seems at first glance? Mocap animations, voice actors, and sheer amount of art assets are the main problems. But the question is not if we can reach it, or give up. The question is, how close can we get?

The real problem with indies is that they fall off the other side of the horse, spending all their time making unique art, building their own tools from scratch, hell, even building their own engines half the time. No wonder they burn out and never get anywhere. Imagine if someone made a game using every single tool that was available to cut down creation time? That's what I plan to do.

 

Thing is, you end up making non stop tools and 3 years later, there's still no game. Cos you spent all the time on tools. And doing those tools isn't a case of "hey unity make this for us" because every game has different and unique tool requirements. Houdini is somewhat popular as it's a configurable and procedural tool itself. So you can cut down on tool construction time.

Asset store isn't a case of plugging missing unity functionality, it's a case of unity could not plug it even if they wanted to.

 

It's a S***ton of work to acquire physical objects or drive to them. Plus the process quite obviously is limited to stuff that exists. Now if you make heavy use of that, and you need stuff created that you can't scan, you now need to match the photo-scan quality level or you will end up with a mess of different visual styles. Scanning is no magical solution imho. It can make a lot of sense for textures, in which case it makes even more sense to let other people, like the guys at Quixel (megascans or whatever it's called once they launch the project), do it for you, and license the stuff. For indies, I think procedural textures and modular designs are the way to go for now, if they want to get a somewhat AAA-ish look.

 

Well my real complaint with Unity is lighting/post/whatever? AAA studios make custom engines all the time that are at Unreal level or beyond, and they make them relatively quickly. I don't imagine the possibility is out of Unity's reach. The Asset Store should be for whiz bang tools not basic rendering solutions.

I think indies don't want to shell out a bit of money for good tools. There are a lot of great ones out there, but they cost a few $$$, but a lot of people here get up in arms about $50-100 tools or some meagre subscription. For the ones that aren't there, yeah you have to make them yourself.

YES. That's my point. Procedural textures for me (probably all bought from Allegorithmic) are a given, and modular kits as well - I doubt there is an AAA studio out there that doesn't make heavy use of modular as well. Star Citizen kitbash all of their levels, such as the massive mining stations, otherwise they wouldn't be able to get the amount of stuff they want.

Yeah photoscanning is probably most useful for characters who are otherwise much more time consuming to create. Imagine if you had a 10k base mesh that you just pulled and pushed the vertices according to the scanned data? the result would be a pretty optimised, pretty good model. That said character editors are not bad these days as long as you don't mind a little bit of a generic look, or want to modify it a little.

 

Will you photoscan goblins or aliens ? This is Zbrush work.

Anyway , you are trying to compete with AAA studios, until you have 100 man with you, there is no way you can produce the same amount of stuff for the game and as good gaming ; whatever tools or generators you use.
You can reach a great level as indie using clever tools , but that's all you won't make the same Witcher 3 because you are indie not a big gaming companie game director with 100-200 workers

 

You mean exactly what I did? Yeah sounds about right. I don't regret going through the process though, it certainly allowed me to figure out limitations in every thing from graphics to AI. The issue is, after going through the process you kind of loose enthusiam and that's a bigger battle than trying to make large games.

@zenGarden

You'd have a big job convincing me an experienced developer couldn't make something like Skyrim, once I looked into it the artwork was kit based, the skeletons were re-tartgeted with the same animations, the UI is bog standard, there's plenty of engines that has some sort of lightweight dynamic lighting like LPV for e.g., post you have, tools for terrain segments you can get from the asset store, speedtree for trees, plenty of dialogue systems.. An inventory isn't difficult to do and all the AI is preset based.

Sure it'd take a while, but if you're smart about it there's no reason you couldn't do it. Now putting up with a project that size is what'll be your downfall, it really does sap the fun out of making games.

 

Of course, if you read my posts you would see that I agreed with you, I'm not saying indies can compete with big budget studios. The point is, where is the icing on the cake? You can take off the icing and still have a cake. You can have top-quality hand-made textures or you can have procedural ones that get you most of the way there. You can Zbrush wrinkles into your characters til the cows come home, or you can accept something a little more generic. That's what I call intelligent corner-cutting, and you'll need to be a master of it to ship an indie game anywhere near AAA. But that doesn't mean it isn't possible to make something pretty good. The most important thing is not to fall in love with unnecessary details, or try to follow some rigid rules about how things 'should' be done.

 

Yeah, burnout, and possibly insufficient game design skills are probably going to be the biggest obstacles for me. But I think there are ways and means to make it easier.

For starters, selling tools, and art that you make alongside your own, are a good way to make money and be productive during development. If you don't end up making your game, you've still got a few nice products to work on.

Also, a short game demo for starters, like what we tried to do a while back. The problem is, that demo should be a showcase of your tools setup and workflow, which is what I didn't realize so much when I started, that's why I quit. And after that demo is finished, you've got a really spectacular piece of work for your portfolio, if you don't end up making the game.

I really do think that, at least toward the end of an indie game, it's a good idea to try and get as many people on board as possible to even the workload. But if you make a high-quality demo yourself you can probably say that you're in a good position to lead a development team, since you have a good idea of how everything works.

 

Wow this looks really amazing, and hats off to the game developers who made it.

But I think as the tools get better as they have too, especially if we want VR to work. Then why should each studio have to rig a human character, or even model one and their clothes. Or even entire cities and lands.

Now each game should tailor their own characters, world, levels and art for maximum gameplay and to have their own style. But how much effort is the game industry putting into making and clothing it's characters, building and filling it's worlds. Over and over again surely they are not all building things from scratch.

Also I think it's funny that the most unrealistic cartoon/hollywood physics scene is one used to show off photo-realism.

That guy would look like a cross between swiss cheese and a hamburger fought over by a couple of bulldogs, if realism was turned on.

 

Well that's just it. It's not hard to make a world and populate it with AI. That's not hard. I've done that. What's hard is giving it purpose, quests, stories. Everyone thinks this part is trivial and they'll blaze through it once you get there. Well I am there, and it's the slowest part of game dev (and the hardest).

 

Making it interesting is the hard part, anyone who has made these sort of games know it's not hard to make your way through tons of quests. But play it back once it's done and it doesn't play out quite like it sounded on paper. Then back to the drawing board.!

10% protoyping, 90% polishing..!

 

Yeah that's exactly what I mean. By quests, I certainly don't mean collecting pigs ears for the next 6 months

 

or bone meal?

 

Let me try it with my universal reply to "Why wouldn't someone be able to do______?":

Why hasn't anyone done it yet? We have no shortage of people wanting to make skyrim style games, nor do we have a shortage of people interested in playing them. If it really was possible, either someone would have gone through with it or at least gotten far enough to show a promising start. Of course I don't know all the indie games out there, but I think there is a good chance that if something impressive like that had been done before, I'd have heard of it.

 

It's hard to understand hippo groans .. Don't get me started on fetch quests, if Dragon Age Inqusition was an actual RP simulator it'd go something like this.

NPC: Can you help, we need wool?
Me: You're a hunter and warrior right?
*Silence*
NPC: Umm yep.
Me: See that massive ******* green thing in the sky? The green thing that could end existance as we know it?
NPC: Urr uhuh!.
Me: You reckon I've got time to walk 10 minutes over there just to fetch you some wool right? How's about you stop being lazy and I'll tend the small matter of you still being around at the end of the day yeah?

 

Lack of time, money, skills? The sheer size of the project, when most people can't even finish a space shooter clone? There's no doubt it would be one of the hardest things to do, but there's no reason it couldn't be done.

I don't pay too much attention to Skyrim style games, although I played it and liked it. But there's the one guy who made Salvation Prophecy, with a little bit of outsourcing. It doesn't look very good to me but it seems big enough in scope. And I think he even built the engine himself! That's the sort of thing I hope to avoid.

Then there's the guy making Limit Theory, which looks pretty damn good to me.

The problem is, the first guy said he 'almost went insane' and the second actually was treated for mental health issues. It shows the pressures of such a high workload. That's why I want to aim for a short demo first, and see how I feel about my dream game after that. And learn how to cut corners like a pro!

 

Because you'd have to be an idiot to do it, two or three years of making a game which will pretty much need all your time and attention for it to be any more than a walking simulator which could potentially flop hard. Yeah sounds like an ideal idea..!

You'd need a substantial marketing budget to pull you out of it, you'd need money for a lot of tools which I have to be honest. How many indie's here earn plus 150K? a year? Even from a day job to fund something like this? Even if you could afford it, I'm pretty sure you'd be better sticking your money somewhere else. Generally people who are successful by their own merit don't tend to go out on daft money loosing ventures.

Also why go to all the expense and effort when low risk potential high gain ventures like crappy flappers exist? There's a metric ton of reasons why you'd be absolutley crazy to do it, doesn't mean you can't do it.

I'm not trying to insult anyone going down this path, if you succeed I will be the first to congratulate and aid your cause.

 

I am insane though, and I like it.

 

Me too, I am one of those "idiots" as you fully well know.

 

This is good because you have unique games happening in unique places and unique time period or in sci fi period.
I would not enjoy playing a game like mmos with generic characters or games with generic cities.

 

Looks like a whole lot of work, but not to the quality where I'd personally be able to enjoy it. Steam reviews are mixed, some seem to like it, some don't. An impressive amount of work for 1 person though.

Looks better, but I'd argue that space is way easier to procedurally generate and populate, than a fantasy landscape with dungeons, castles, cities. And regarding the fun... personally I find even the quests in Elite Dangerous unbearably dull. I can hardly imagine that one person can pull of something more compelling, but maybe I'm wrong? Anyway, pretty impressive for a 1 person project too.

This strengthens my impression that 1 person only could do it "in theory" and not "in practice".

I should have specified that when I say "skyrim-style" I want to imply that it actually has some of the quality to give people at least part of the joy they felt when playing Skyrim. I'd imagine, if you manage to make a game that's as much fun as Skyrim and looks good, it will basically sell itself. I wouldn't waste a thought whether or not 1 person can make a soulless unenjoyable walking simulator with fighting, grinding and crafting. The last thing the gaming world needs is more bad games. It's not just about "making games", it's about "making good games" or at least trying to. Anything else on big project scale is an utter waste of time imho. People struggle to make even small games fun, how would 1 person do that on skyrim-scale? How would that single dev balance that game for example? I remain unconvinced that this could be done in a solo effort, but maybe you're thinking of something waaay more MVP than I do? Might be pointless to argue about the feasibility of such a project anyway. Neither of us is gonna attempt to take on such a project alone.

And I'm still super curious to finally see the game you are working on yourself!

 

Besides from I have protoyped games like Skyrim many a time, that's originally what I was doing. I started off the concept by myself after completing a small diablo style game in Unity. After a browse of the forums I decided your stereotypical dungeon crawler was way too common so set on adventures grande latte. Again all the concepts / prototypes etc. I did it all on my lonesome before getting way too big for my boots and had to expand.

Myself and hippo know of small teams (originally one / two man bands) that are making MMO's, one of them has a deal with Microsoft and is attending GDC this year.

So from my own experiences, I know for a fact it's possible and because of it I've been pretty much turned off making games. You say it will basically sell itself, but I remain unconvinced as some excellent large games have just dissapeared into the void. What's to say if I completed said game the same wouldn't happen?

I'll be honest, we used a lot of third party artwork like @Chariots did.. I got paranoid after the whole "jimquisition" thing and scrapped an entire concept, starting making tons of art (which put things back over a year). There was rumblings about where to take the game once we started re-making it, until Unity 5.X became a thing didn't like large games, we spent a lot of time learning UE4.

Then the ultimate question dawned on me finally, why am I doing this?

 

Not sure I agree... in any case the fact that the Skyrim content (or the dungeon content at least) was made out of kits worked on by 2 people, makes it seem relatively easy to generate this sort of content, although the sheer amount is an obstacle.

But yes, of course the main problem is creating story, missions etc. The simple fact is that a lot of people don't have the ability to communicate a story very well, and those that do fail to tie it in with good, simple game mechanics. I think this has a lot to do with why most indie games fail, and not because of some sort of 'problems with the game industry in this day and age'. They just aren't all that fun to play, they aren't fulfilling in every respect.

Not to mention that those who are good artistically often struggle with code engineering, and vice versa. You have to be a bit of a dual personality to be an artist and a coder at the same time.

But most of all, I think that indies fail to manage projects properly. In the industry you have a boss who only cares about the bottom line, artists who only care about how things look, coders who only care about optimized code, and so on. You put them in a room for a while, and after a lot of arguing you end up with a compromise. However solo indies tend to fall off the horse in which ever direction they tend toward ... and you end up with a game that is unfinished in some respects and great in others, and is difficult to play. You need to ruthlessly optimize every part of game development and cut ragged corners where needs be, and it is very hard to do that when you're the one writing the code and making the art.

 

I seen some great solo indie projects like Elysian Dust. When you have the all ideas , concept , passion and skill you will do good.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUTZOvwIcyQ
However Skyrim like projects is too big for one guy only or it will take ten or twenty years. Sure you can tools , characters pack, dungeon tile packs and other stuff and try to assemble that as a game. Or combine outdoor generated terrain with some hand made terrain work, and use some dungeon generator where you would place manually some bosses and some quests.
The common way is to scale down the project in many aspects if you are solo or a small team, in counter part bring original ideas or combinations not seen elsewhere.

 

But look at Modders, they can make some amazing adaptations and massive improvements to an existing game world in a fraction of the time of the intial developers.

It's 2016 we have been making open world 3D games for about 20 years now.

Does anyone else hope that the industry can stabilise or settle on a set of enabling technologies that would allow anyone to make a game world and play within it.

And why don't we have hardware ray tracing yet, we have lighting tech, shadow tech but not ray tracing?

 

They use the engine, tools and all base art that have been developped from scratch to make the game.
Crysis 2,3 are good examples, lot of people just use the same game assets and just make another bland fps with nothing new.

They are tools , but unique game is what players like, unique characters, unique world , unique gameplay, unique content.
This is called team talent and skills.
There is already mmos generators and the resulting games are crap and looks too similar.
If you don't have skills, the levels or characters made using generators will look very bland and generic until you hire talented people.

This is like music, you have music generators , but this is bland music.
The music need to be unique to success and the talent this is you not the violin or guitar or any music generators.

For what ? Only graphics don' t make a good game , there has been some examples already.
I am very happy with UE4 lightmass and CryEngine Svogi already, you have already the engines and good enought lightening to make your dream game.

 

How much are you willing to bet on you being correct? Are you saying it would take me 20 years or you? Because it certainly would not take anywhere near that time if you of course knew how to do it.

 

Because I want to be able to live with myself? Because I want to do what I want to do?

"It doesn't make financial sense" is an argument against it, but it all depends on how much the individual cares about money.

Also, I want to add:

You're not my dad ShadowK! Let me do what I want! I'm going to my room!

 

Would i be able to make the next Skyrim in two years ? no Or Witcher 4 game content and engine next tools alone ? no.
If there is some indie lonewolf able to make the next AAA big game it will take years, and it's game will be outdated because AAA games will have moved a level above .
For example Witcher 2 to 3 or Dragon Age 2 to Inquisition is a significant step.We never seen someone alone able to make a AAA production as big as other big productions , because today a AAA game means 100-200 people team unlike the Snes or old PC era where big games was made by teams of 5 or 10 people.

Let me know if you find someone alone able to produce Uncharted 5.

 

What are you on about? We're talking about Skryim, a game made years back not the latest greatest AAA games. A lot of tech has been filtered down, some of the stuff that would take them months can now be done in seconds with what is on the asset store or built into Unreal so you can focus on the meat and tato's..

Just because YOU couldn't build a game like Skyrim in a reasonable amount of time, it doesn't mean others couldn't.

Enough talk, prove it or leave it ..

 

There's a huge difference between Skyrim and Uncharted, one of them is just dungeon looting and the other is a character-driven, story based game with high fidelity. High quality mocap animations (including facial) and good quality voice acting can be expensive, but it's doable if you want to shell out some money. Complex storytelling and long, quality cutscenes are hard to do. On the other hand a game like Skyrim has a lot of repetitious, relatively bland animations and voice acting and the content is much easier to create (more dungeons?)

But yeah, I'll say it one last time, a few hundred people can always do more than one, but you have to find out where you can cut costs/time. Are they hiring hundreds of artists to make characters from scratch? Well if you can deal with some generic character graphics, let's say on the level of EVE online, you can bypass all of that. Are they making all of their materials from scratch? Buy a materials library and bypass that. Sure, it won't have the last 5-10% graphics quality but it will be pretty good.

If you're serious, you have to look at all of the different aspects and figure out where you can take a reduction in quality, and where you can't.

 

This can be done indeed if you bring money on the table for character system, plugins for shaders and gameplay like IK, and money for some game content , indeed you can achieve a big game.
Anyway to ake it good enought you will still need to make unique assets and make unique clothes for characters, and create unique magic effects for example.

This can be done, you can buy plugins and content , but you'll still have lot of work if you expect to do better than just drop characters and buildings on top of a forest.
World of Warcraft has each region and place that is crafted carefully, 3D artists paint the vegetation, but they go in detail mode to make the terrain having very unique places, so this is still lot of level design work to make it look unique and good.

I agree open world Skyrim can be done, it uses a character system and lot of reused assets, indeed with some money buying assets and some plugin and using a character system, buying lot of voice actors content it could be done.
I was more talking about the big AAA boys like Uncharted 4 or FFXV that uses lot more tech ,unique high quality content and advanced gameplay.

Is there available some free and easy to use plugin character system in Unity ?

 

Yeah, well those sort of games really are on another level and is a no-go for any indie. Have you seen the the new FF7 remake? To paraphrase Futurama, realism can bite my shiny metal bottom. That has to be the prittiest game I've ever seen, it doesn't look realistic more of a surreal hyper-realism that just looks fantastic.

 

AAA games take money, including indie ones. The question is, do you want to hire an artist at $50-100 an hour (or more) for a month or two to make a character like Nathan Drake, or buy a reasonable quality character creation tool for a few hundred bucks? Hundreds, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars are necessary depending on how far you want to go, but the bottom line is, you have to be ready to invest serious money. Tools are the artists and coders that indie's can't afford.

I haven't really looked into character creation yet, I've made a few characters myself though. Isn't there something called UMA on the store? Maybe someone else can be more helpful.