next »

[Rishav]

Not really sure where this goes, sine it isn't a game... but wth.

I have finally decied to bury my butt in the indie game dev scene. the bad thing is that I have no ide how to start off. The good thing is that i am biting off chewwable chunks. To start off with, I am thinking of making a tech demo of sorts. a simple map on which i will have my character roam around. with iterations i will keep on adding features and stuff till I end up with something similar to a quake level. 1 playable character vs 1 enemy character. thats the plan. 

I think the order of doing stuff is;
1. make character model.
2. add animation to model.
3. make simple level.
4. import meshes in a game engine and blah blah.

I have finished step 1. I have created a simple low poly charcter model in Blender. SHe is an original character, I am currently calling "The Countess". This is the very first time I have worked on a 3D app and this would be my 2nd model (the first being the gingerbread man in blender tutes). To me it looks pixar worthy, but i am sure i have screwed off at many places.




Any feedbak/critiques and advices are welcome. remember, this is not a static rendering model but a game model. is it ok? the plycount is 1900. I am also worried about the irregularities of the surface , the edginess. How do i get rid of them?






Finally, what now? should I go for displacement & texture or should I do rigging first?

PS. more i am reading my post more i feel like it belongs in the Art forum.

[Chris Pavia]

The traditional method would be to texture it, then rig, skin and animate.  Older versions of modeling programs would often have issues if you made changes to the mesh after/while you rigged it, but that isn't much of a problem anymore so technically you could texture and rig it at the same time, although if you're a beginner I would recommend finishing the texture process first.
I don't have any experience with Blender so I can't be much help with fixing your edge shading, but Max uses a system called Smoothing Groups, and Maya has the Harden/Soften Edge functions if that helps, in case Blender uses similar taxonomy.
A polycount of 1900 is fine, but is that poly or tri count?  Different modeling packages show them differently as standard.  Triangle count is the standard for what goes in game, although some studios go by vertex count instead.
If you're going to animate this, I would recommend lowering the count as low as you can because the less you have to deal with, the more you can focus on the animating instead of wrangling skin weights.  Those parts on her shoulders and arm are going to be a headache to deal with if you have no experience rigging and animating.
She looks good for a first model, although her proportions seem a bit stretched.

[Rishav]

Thanks Chris. So texturing it is. Time to hunt some tutorials for that.
Also, I think it would be prudent to raise a question in the blender forums itself for the edge smoothing.

regarding poly count, thats the number of faces. so I thinks its polygons instead of triangles. her shoulder pads and pauldrons are not attached to her body and so maybe they wouldn't pose much problems while animating. It would be nice not to touch up the model anymore but I want to learn about weighing and creases. all game models I see have the lines getting nearer towards the joints and my model lacks that.

Finally, her proportions were designed that way. Her lower body is much longer. Its just a stylised character versus a realistic one.  I took a lara croft figure as reference and just pretty much followed her comic book curves. I also reduced the cleavage size a bit. I might size it down a bit if it looks real weird.

thanks for your advice.
regards
Rishav.

[Bree]

Cool model! Just curious about one thing- what's the difference between skinning and texturing?

[Chris Pavia]

Texturing is the process of painting the color and materials, as well as the shader work.  Skinning is taking the skeleton you've made and 'painting' weights on it so each vertex knows which bone(s) it should be moving with.

If the polycount is in faces, then it's probably referring to polygons.  Which isn't a big deal, but if you decide to put her in your portfolio or something, remember that triangles are the standard way of counting.  Maya displays both, and Max (at least the older versions) only displayed polygon count, you'd have to throw on a Triangulate modifier to get the true count.  Good luck with her!

[Rishav]

heh. no portfolio. I am a software tester in a run-of-the-mill IT job. this is just a new shiny hobby I picked up.
Once i get a hang of the entire workflow, i will try to make a whole new model for her. RIght now, she is just a placeholder.

@ Theo. Thanks.