Sarah Clarity Studios

Chapter 1: Silhouette Banks & Lineup Pages

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Silhouette Banks & Lineup Pages

From Brief to Package: The Character Concept Pipeline (Ideation → Iteration → Finals → Handoff)

Silhouette banks and lineup pages are the engine of readable character design. Before anatomy, costume, or materials, the eye reads massing, negative space, and balance. Treat silhouettes as the earliest deliverable that proves a character’s role, scale, and gameplay promise at a glance, and treat lineups as the communication layer that makes those silhouettes comparable, testable, and greenlight‑ready. This article speaks to both concept designers on the exploration side and production artists who will inherit the work; its goal is to make the same pages do double duty: inspire, and instruct.

Start with the Brief You Can Measure

Every strong silhouette bank begins with constraints. Restate the role (hero, support, tank, striker, healer, NPC tier), the mechanical reads required (range vs. melee, mobility class, power posture), and the camera distances in which the character must be legible (FPP hands, over‑the‑shoulder TPP, isometric, marketing key art). Add production realities: target poly budget ranges, rig family, animation reuse, and accessory rules. Converting these constraints into “shape goals” keeps ideation honest: a tank asks for a low center of gravity and broad contact patches; a striker asks for elastic arcs and tapered thrust lines; a healer asks for asymmetry concentrated around tools rather than mass.

Ideation: Building a Silhouette Bank That Actually Banks

In the ideation phase, your objective is quantity with a plan. Work small and fast in flat value or two‑tone, aiming for fifty to one hundred micro‑thumbnails per role or theme. Vary proportions deliberately in each row: head‑to‑body ratios, limb lengths, shoulder‑to‑hip width, and footprint shape. Force variety by changing the negative space between limbs, the angle of the spine, and the distribution of mass across the vertical thirds. When you find a promising cluster, branch it three ways—exaggerate the dominant gesture, invert the weight distribution, and simplify it to its cleanest abstract read.

A good bank shows intent without costume crutches. Avoid early surface noise; keep props to pure graphic reads. If a prop is essential to class readability (a banner for a commander, a staff for a healer), let its silhouette partner with the body rather than float like an afterthought. Favor open poses that expose readable gaps over occluded arm‑against‑torso tangents. Each thumbnail should be testable at 5–10% of final on‑screen height; if it fails at that size, it will fail during combat.

Iteration: From Seeds to Families

Iteration transforms a scattered bank into coherent families. Group promising silhouettes by shared DNA—stance archetype, weight class, and role language—and evolve them across a short series. For each family, run a proportion sweep (short‑legged to long‑legged, narrow to wide), a rhythm sweep (blocky to flowing), and a balance sweep (forward‑loaded to rear‑loaded). The goal is to discover the “hero specimen” that expresses the intent most economically. Keep the rest as viable skins, variants, or faction dialects. When rescoping occurs, these families are your insurance policy against restarting from zero.

While exploring, begin to sketch low‑fidelity internal anatomy: hinge positions, spine S‑curve, neck angle, and hand span. These affect rig viability later. Even without line detail, place markers for knee and elbow centers and indicate plantar contact area; production artists read these cues to forecast deformation risk and foot plant stability.

Lineup Pages: Comparative Truth‑Telling

A lineup is where silhouettes must compete for the same oxygen. Place characters on a common ground plane with a consistent eye level and lighting direction. Include a human metric unit or a rig proxy to lock scale. Organize the lineup by role or faction so that progression and contrast are evident: the tank anchors the low‑frequency end, the striker the high‑frequency end, the support frames negative space, the healer carries an external device read, and the NPC tiers show restrained complexity.

Lineups should include two to three distance bands per page: extreme long‑shot reads at 5–10% on‑screen height, mid‑gameplay reads at 20–30%, and close‑read busts for marketing. At each band, test the silhouettes in flat value only, then in two‑value with accent cut‑ins. If you cannot remove the gray noise without losing identity, the design is over‑dependent on texture and hue. Production artists can then predict which designs will fight LODs, compression, and motion blur.

Cross‑Discipline Read Tests Early

Bake in simple but revealing tests during lineups. Flip the page horizontally to catch balance biases. Collapse each silhouette to a one‑stroke contour to check for awkward zigzags. Drop the lineup over a noisy environment plate to ensure characters pop without outline cheats. For FX‑heavy roles, overlay a mock VFX occlusion cloud and confirm that the remaining body read still communicates stance and intent. These tests anticipate what rigging, animation, VFX, and UI will do under real gameplay stress.

Bridging Exploration and Production

Exploration artists should annotate the winning silhouettes with minimal but essential intent notes: center of gravity path, primary limb arcs, and “do‑not‑break” ratios (e.g., head width to shoulder span). Production artists should respond with feasibility flags: joint range expectations, cloth‑vs‑armor collision risk, and attachment points reserved for weapons or UI trackers. Keep this conversation inside the lineup PSD: one page, many layers, a clear comment channel. The asset remains a living contract rather than a pretty poster.

Finals: From Silhouette to Shape Hierarchy

Finalization begins only after a silhouette survives distance tests, lineup comparison, and cross‑disciplinary critique. Now you graduate to controlled shape hierarchy: large shapes carry role; medium shapes tell faction and function; small shapes carry craft and story. Lock the body block‑in with an ortho‑friendly stance: feet parallel, arms slightly away from the torso to preserve negative space, and spine neutral enough for rigging. Keep value grouping disciplined so material changes won’t muddy the read; strong value blocks are the scaffold your colorist and surfacing teams will rely on later.

For hero characters, prepare a colorless “value‑final” silhouette sheet alongside the color concept. Many studios approve values first because they predict both gameplay readability and marketing flexibility. Production inherits fewer surprises when value hierarchy is contractual.

Handoff: What the Next Team Actually Needs

A silhouette bank resolves into a final lineup plus a compact package of supporting pages. Provide the approved lineup at three scales, the hero silhouette at ortho‑ready stance, and a proportions grid keyed to engine units. Add callouts for attachment loci (weapons, gadgets, VFX anchors), soft‑vs‑hard boundaries for simulation, and any asymmetry that must survive mirroring. Include a “silhouette diet” note—a one‑paragraph rationale of which elements may be simplified for LOD and which cannot be touched without changing class read. Name files predictably, version them atomically, and include a change log that spells out what moved between V01 and V02.

Production artists will convert these pages into orthographics, topology guides, and rig tests. The cleaner your silhouette scaffolding, the fewer times they will need to reinterpret joints, weights, and cloth layers. If the silhouette implies a cape, ensure there is plan for motion arcs and collision volumes; if it implies a tail or wings, specify span, ground clearance, and rest poses to avoid late rig compromises.

Camera‑Aware Readability

Because silhouette quality lives or dies by camera, tie every page to the views that matter. For over‑the‑shoulder third‑person, the back read and shoulder skyline dominate; for isometric, hat brims and shoulder spikes vanish while capes and backpacks become billboards; for first‑person, the left hand and forearm communicate class more than the whole body. Run micro lineups per camera mode and adjust massing accordingly. This prevents last‑minute overdraw for marketing shots that break in gameplay.

Avoiding Common Failure Modes

Three problems sink silhouette banks. First, variety without purpose: many shapes, one idea. Cure this by writing the role verbs at the top of the page and checking that each silhouette acts those verbs. Second, proportional drift caused by drawing from memory. Cure with a pinned scale bar and a rig proxy layer you never turn off. Third, detail creep: small cuts and accessories that fake uniqueness but muddy the read. Cure with periodic downscales and a rule that any small shape must reinforce a larger rhythm.

A Shared Definition of “Done”

For exploration, “done” means the bank contains at least three viable families, each proved at distance with lineup comparisons and annotated for intent. For production, “done” means orthos and block‑ins can be made without guessing: joints are clear, attachments are marked, and the value hierarchy is locked. For the project, “done” means downstream teams can build, rig, light, animate, and market the character without returning to ask what the silhouette meant.

Practical Page Architecture

Keep a consistent file architecture so the studio can read your pages at a glance. A typical silhouette bank file has one master canvas with a ground plane, scale bar, and camera stamps; rows for each family; and a right‑hand column reserved for hero picks and notes. The lineup file mirrors that structure but collapses exploration into the approved set, shown at three distances and over a neutral background plus a noisy environment plate. Sticky notes live on their own layer group, never painted into pixels.

For Concept and for Production—Equally

Concept‑side artists should think like editors of possibility, pushing the boundaries of proportion and rhythm while guarding clarity. Production‑side artists should think like translators, honoring the silhouette’s grammar while optimizing it for performance and pipeline. When both groups work from the same bank and the same lineup page, the handoff isn’t a baton toss; it is a continuous line of sight from the first shadow to the final shipped frame.

Silhouette banks and lineup pages are not just early steps; they are the north star you return to when features creep and schedules compress. If the silhouette still sings at distance, the character will survive any crunch. If it doesn’t, no amount of surface brilliance will save it. Design your banks and lineups to tell the truth early—and you will save weeks later.