3D Characters

Hello,

I'm currently at the very early stages of making a game but I'm always looking into the future and seeing what issues / barriers I might have to overcome along the journey of development.

One of the main ones for me is having 3D character in my game, I don't feel like I could model them to a good standard, I feel like I could create building / environmental props.

But when it comes to characters there is just far to much detail for me to get good enough at 3D modelling to attempt them. I feel like I could animate them well enough though. I have been looking around and there are a few 3D character creation software's available such as Fuse, Autodesk & Daz 3D. And I feel these could serve my need's at the moment to get the game passed it's early stages of development.

What I'm wondering would these work in a 3D game or would they be to performance heavy, In the future I would plan to hire a professional 3D modeller and animator to do the models for me, but as it's the early stages of working on my game I want to keep the costs low and see if I actually get something working first and get the core part of the game done before I start investment.

Thank you for anyone that reads this and can provide some information for me on this subject, Hopefully someone has tried this approach and can even give me some guidance on importing these assets to gain the best performance from them.

 

Hopefully someone can give you a better answer as I have not made use of those solutions myself. However I think the thing to look for is the polycount when those characters are exported, that'll give you an indicator about whether they are actually usable in game from a performance perspective. If the polycount is too high then you have options such as reptopology but that can be a big task. Your additional challenge is that those meshes may not be rigged ready for animation so you'll just being using a t-pose model.

 

Hi, it depends on how much characters you want in your game and how many appear on screen at the same time. Fuse Characters have a tri count around 29000 and you have to rig them.

For prototyping i would recommend you some characters from Mixamo.com. Simply because you can choose a character, the motions you need and you are good to go.

 

Yes they would work in a game. But you might have to do some edits and tweaks, on the 3d models to make them work well in any game engine.

Would they be performance heavy? It depends on the game you're making.
If it's just 2 characters on the screen like in a fighting game, 30,000 tris or a bit more for each character, might be good enough for PC.

If it's a PC game, with alot of characters on screen like in an mmorpg game, you'll have to use alot less, like about 2000 tris or a bit more or less, for each character.

But if the game (fighting game or mmorpg or other) is for tablets or phones etc, you'll have to use alot less polys, to make it run properly on those devices.

Okay. If you are not confident in your modelling skills, then hiring is a good idea. The only downside to that, is that the hired 3d modeller, would not be capable of making the 3d model, look 100% the way you want it to look. That is one of the big disadvantages of hiring a 3d modeller. It's almost the same thing with hiring an animator. But it is possible, that an animator might be able to animate a character, close to how you want the character to be animated. But nothing is guaranteed.

Hope that helps.