Topic: 3D Modeling WIP Topic

[ratty redemption]

understood, and cool. and i like how your character is looking high enough polys from that camera distance and angle.

[kat]

One of the reasons for making the 'foot' part of the boots larger is to prevent sections of it disappearing as it clips the ground plain when engaged in motion - you can get a sense of this from the shot above. You can also see some pretty bad anti-alising issues on the figure, which again is another reason to 'over compensate' with thicker/larger arms, legs and hands, if you make the silhouettes (structural mass) too small, AA jaggies mean you loose a lot of readable details which make the mesh look a little odd. Granted this is just a test/example project to get people started, but it's something to watch out for.

For the skirt, play with the weighting assignments, it looks like that hemline is shared with the knee or upper leg which is causing the intersection - try to avoid adding geometry to solve issues like that as it can cause problems in of itself.

Nice rig. Simple, with the necessities.

[silicone_milk]

That's a good point about limbs. It turns out, in this case, that the artifacts are just a result of not having anti-aliasing even enabled in the quality settings for the renderer (whoops). It's still *kind of* noticeable at x2 AA but at x8 there are no artifacts. I don't think x8 AA is practical to run at especially on iphone devices though.

One thought that has crossed my mind is to bake the animation frames into sprite sheets and take them into Photoshop to touch up the images and get rid of aliasing artifacts. But then I lose the ability to blend animation states with Mecanim and the physics become an odd thing to deal with.

I'll mess around with the weights some more. It seemed no matter what I did I couldn't get the weights to properly deform the skirt. I should keep in mind that when people wear (tight) skirts their range of leg motion gets more and more restricted as skirt length increases.

The bad deformation only appears when I bring her up in a kicking-a-door-in pose which would never actually happen. I need to see how it looks with jump/roll and ladder-climbing animations.

[kat]

Yup, it's not a good idea to rely on AA to mask artifacts like the ones mentioned above because, as you rightly point out, support for that will vary across different platforms. In the end it's more about designing relative to what's seen on screen rather than what we're expecting to see (making things anatomically correct) - like making the barrel of a handheld weapon slightly wider or short to compensate for field of vision foreshortening. And yep, switching to sprites would mean designing the demo in a slightly different way to overcome the (apparent) limitations of that 'format'.

[silicone_milk]

Got a little bit more work done today since I had the day off. Hair mesh added and I've been trying to figure out how to rig ponytails. I'm experimenting with Spline IK constraints and turning the spline into a soft body.



I need to close up the gaps between head and hair probably. Also, she's lookin a tad block-headed on the upper right section of her hair which I'll tweak tomorrow.

Once the hair has a working rig I'll give her an idle, run, and jump animation and finally record the video.

[ratty redemption]

you're making good progress on this character.

[kat]

Ha excellent! You might want to 'thicken' the collar area in the same way you've done the sleeves to unify the general appearance of the garment the character is wearing. Definitely looking forward to the next vid.

[silicone_milk]

Recovered what I had left of the model after I was forced to do a hard restart on the machine. I had disabled auto-save so as to not clutter the Unity assets folder and hadn't actually saved the .blend file myself so I wound up losing half her hair and all of the rigging I had done for the pigtails.

Decided to redo her hair from scratch, play with some AO baking, and try a new look for her with short red hair and throwing a scarf on her. The scarf is what I originally had in mind but something about it is bugging me; I think I have the way it wraps modeled wrong.

I like how she's ended up looking though. I was really not looking forward to trying to animate hair for her different actions. A scarf doesn't sound all that much better but it does seem a little more straightforward.

I feel like I want to slap a gold fish stencil on the dark blue scarf.




Here she is loaded up in Unity. I duplicated her so you can see the back of the scarf since it's not double-sided and doesn't render when viewed from the front. Simple fix.


Edit: Not entirely sure why the images are so large? I thought they defaulted to a restrained size since the last time I posted large images a couple years back heh.

[kat]

The image resizing thing the forum does seems a bit hint-n-miss, it should re-size over-sized images to the width default (which is about 700px), but some sources (where the images are uploaded) seems to cause problems. I've no idea how to fix it without perhaps looking at 'inline' attachments (attachments that are included in a post rather than underneath).

It sucks dodo you lost the work.. but... it's improved for the better! This new version character works well, not sure if that translates to being "better" per say because the differences the short-crop hair makes are quite significant and the tails of the previous worked well to read as 'girl' (see next point). A couple of observations: the short hair does make the character look like a boy rather than girl so how about trying to re-task the old 'Goldilocks' mesh and having both a boy and girl (this might allow you later on, to produce an AI 'follow me' vid)? I'm not sure about the indented gray area around the waist, unless you're going to be putting something there (a belt? gadgets?) it might be better to unify the torso so it reads better. The feet still seem to get lost in the ground so try changing their shape a little;  looking at the foot from the side you want something like a tri-angle rather than a t-bone (see below).

Overall though they're both good examples of being effective with simple character design. Nice job so far!.

[silicone_milk]

Thanks, I'm glad you like the new version of the character. I was having a hard time seeing a boy when I first read your response. I think it was because I was biased in that I designed the character to be a girl so all I was seeing was a girl regardless of hair style. After a nap though and looking at it again I can't unsee the male character.

I think with some proper texture painting it could help a bit if not make the character androgynous. I don't necessarily want the character to be super girly but I don't want a boyish character either. It would be nice to create a character that fit what the player felt was right for them.

The belt area does look considerably funky now that I'm looking closer at it. I don't know what's going on there. I think I just colored the belt too wide so the fold of the tunic/skirt is the same color as the belt rather than the lighter blue which makes the belt look like a world wrestling champion heavyweight belt or something lol.

Feet have been bothering me for a long while. I might make them smaller again more along the lines of something like [dead image link]

EDIT: Looking at that gif more closely I just realized how similar in a lot of ways it is to my 'goldilocks' character and my newer red-headed character. Blonde, blue scarf, the belt area, and the hair style was similar except I went with pigtails but had been seriously considering a ponytail. I only found this gif just the other day too lol. No wonder I like it so much!

[kat]

We generally don't engage with characters that don't have obvious 'character' so whilst the point is taken about making her/him more than a little ambiguous, it might be better to push towards one or the other. This would then allow the player to invest more completely in who they (the player) thinks the character is. But, this is kind of getting away from the purpose of why you made the character so just focus on that for now and git-er-done (the videos). See what you can do about the boots and belt before going too much further though as they don't 'read' too well at present (which we've probably now firmly established lol) *up*.

[silicone_milk]

haha I know I know. I get hung up on details. I'm going nuts over here with my UV map going apeshit whenever I make even the smallest of changes to the geometry

[kat]

Yes that will happen. Not sure if you know this but what you can do to mitigate that a little is "Pin" UVW vertices in the UV/Image Editor. Select a vertex and then press "P" ("Alt+P" to clear). This pins the selected verts into position so any subsequent changes are mapped relative to the pins. It's quite handy sometimes for exactly the situation you're in.

[silicone_milk]

Played around a bit more with texture baking which I covered in a video ages ago. Intentions are to have single textures like you'd see in Quake 3 where you would apply the texture per-face. Then after everything is applied, bake all the used textures into one UV map for the model.

It's a bit of a pain to set up initially. I'll see how things go with it.

[ratty redemption]

i find it interesting to see the development process here guys, and i do agree with the points kat raised, good luck milk.

ot: kat i've just noticed the text above the quick reply is apparently black on a dark grey background, so my end it's barely readable.