Official Accessories for the Townsfolk

Sounds good - I will send it over sometime this afternoon (for me,) which will be a few hours after the livestream so I would look for it tomorrow.

Thanks,

Dan

 

@cirocontinisio - Great Livestream today. I'm watching your "Improve your animation workflow with Animation Rigging | Unite Now 2020" video right now.

I uploaded the blend file, the texture, and fbx exported from that file to a google drive.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1r5gI8QmxYa2ZOrzhjbB5xR5F3J7_zKb5?usp=sharing

Essentially I imported the townsfolk walking fbx, stripped the townsfolk mesh, attached and weight painted the pack to the skeleton. I did not add, remove, change any of the existing skeleton (though there are many extra unused bones.)

When I bring it into Unity (as in posts above,) I can not seem to get the pack to animate with the character.

I have read / seen a few videos now on this being done with a script - though these videos are also from a few years back.

In an ideal world - I would love to have a few extra bones on the pack to be able to animate a bit of squash and stretch and give a secondary movement to the strap that holds the pack shut which might be a good case for the Animation Rigging within Unity - but I don't know if adding bones will mess anything else up.

 

Yes, I worked on it and here's the result:



Let thoughts come.

 

I immediately thought the same thing, "Woohoo party hat!"

What sticks out to me is that the hat itself looks rather flat, can there be more texture/layering added to the yellow and blue stripes? Maybe so they have a similar feel to the pink/blue/green/red strips at the top? And maybe put some height on the dots? Unfortunately I don't know how to do that, and it'd probably make the triangle count go way up, but I think it'd be a nice touch if possible.

Along with a party hat, we need those kazoo or roll up/out streamer things! With confetti! And a confetti cannon to celebrate someone finally winning the competition. It could be old and dusty because no one has won in 20 tries.

 

Maybe I didn't understand it. Are you saying that the colours are plain, some repeating pattern on top of stripes (like rest of the cap), or they should be out from the surface of the cone?

 

Is real height required or visual effect is enough?

 

Out from the surface of the cone

Visual effect is probably fine, they just look a little flat.

 

I finally managed to find time to make "some" tests. Unfortunately, no luck

What I found:
I believe the reason why the rigs don't match out of the box is because, when exporting the .fbx from Blender, you get a rig with a different bone order than the original.

I found a script by our own Tsubaki from Unity Japan which visualises the order of the bones:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/rep...derer-causes-deformation.351474/#post-2334023

I tested it because the three animated files from our artist (Idle, Walk and Talk) all have the same order. It means that the order is probably coming from Maya, and since they come from the same file they are spat out with the same order.

So, looking for a solution to reorder them...

I also found another script which, on asset import, reorders the bones in a SkinnedMeshRenderer by their name. This should be enough to have them match, because if the bones are the same and are called the same, they should also come with the same order.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/ass...0.2116613665.1610955665-1145404875.1593207449

Unfortunately, when I use the script on the models, they don't automatically take the same order. Image below is with Tsubaki's visualiser:



The weird thing is that I seem to be "almost there". Look at the ears: left ear is 43-42 on the backpack, right is 11-12. On the Townsfolk, it's 41-40 and 9-10. So it looks like there's 2 numbers of difference, with a certain consistency.
The bandana is 0 on both models, which I think makes sense because in alphabetical order ba- is the first object.

But from this image, I can also see some bones are just in another position, so I wonder if you made any mistake in importing the bone structure? That would mean we will never fix it, even with the script.

The other thing that I don't know how to solve (I'm not a big Blender expert) is that the file you passed has everything under an object called "Pack.basket.v3"



When exporting, this object becomes the new root of the bone hierarchy, which I also think could cause issues since it effectively counts as an extra bone, offsetting all the IDs.

Oh by the way, these are my settings when exporting. Important things are setting the Z positive forward (it is initially -Z), selecting Apply Transform, ticking Only Deform Bones and Add Leaf Bones.



I think Add Leaf Bones is important because, if not using it, you don't get the final bone in the .fbx. You can see how here when I don't enable it, I am missing a bunch of leaf bones in the basket:



However, I don't know much more than this right now. Unfortunately as I said, the order seems to carry over still wrong and I'm not sure if it's fixable "from this end". Maybe it needs to reimport the model into Blender.

Actually, if I import the Walk .fbx into Blender, I see two different skeletons:



Left is Walk, right is your backpack.

I'll leave it to you now, I'm out of time

 

@cirocontinisio ,

Thanks for your hard work and import / export tips. I think the key here for us learning is that something like this, extra clothing, mesh additions, etc, should, and would probably be done from the original Maya (in this case,) file.

re: the two different skeletons, Mine was exported with the bones oriented and linked, where the straight FBX import imports them all on axis. The heads of the bones should be in the same spot though. This I suppose might cause a re-order issue.

I will probably try a couple more small things but I will not get my hopes too high and move onto to something else.

Thanks again

 

Here's a farmer hat that I made. I haven't requested a pull for GitHub at the moment. I wanted to get some critique before I do. The Polycount is in one of the photos and the texture is 512x512.

 

And it looks quite like a farmers hat. I like how you made it look well worn.

 

@shuttle127, visual effect to the dots has been added. But I am having difficulties in adding height to the stripes. They are just circle in the texture. I used the knife tool but then the texture looks odd.

So I think the stripes are fine as texture...

 

Nice farmer hat @MortyJHin. Now we have a farmer to grow vegetables and fruits that @Smurjo made.

 

When planning ahead with the knife tool, this wouldn't happen that much. Just if you make a very narrow piece and then pull the edges apart the texture becomes very stretched. But not all is lost - you can move the texture coordinates in the UV image editor window.

 

I did it



Let me know what about this.

 

Can we see it in Unity? With the toon shader? It's always important to try with that, as the final effect is completely different.

Also, is that 5900 triangles?? Waaaay too many for a hat of that level of detail! Maybe 300, or even less!

 

That Triangle count is the Townsfolk + Cap.
Cap is only 32 Triangles.

Yes, sure. I will post it tonight (for me).

 

Oh I see, my bad!! I was like, that's a lot of triangles! (but the cap also seemed smooth, I think it's the result of the render being done in Blender with GI on).

 

I shaded smooth the normals. And also, the decorations on the top took about 50 faces.
Here is the Hat with Toon Shader:

Should I open a PR?

 

Before I work on my next set of accessories, I wanted to give the farmer some stuff to make it official. So I gave the farmer a pitchfork and a straw of hay to finish it off. I won't request a PR until I finish the other hat/tools that I'm going to give for another villager design.

Besides showing this, I wanted to ask if I should have the straw of hay be rigged instead.

 

That's cool, it's great to have multiple items belonging to the same character! Since they are not dressed differently, this will allow us to make them more unique.

No, definitely not. We can maybe add a virtual bone using Animation Rigging (as described here), but that's for later.

Thanks!

 

To give you some feedback (art is always hard to criticise ):
While the shape is good, and thanks for keeping it low in triangle count, I am not super into the texture. The dots are stretched, you need to relax the projection of the UVs in Blender probably. Right now I assume you're just projecting as a plane from the top, which creates the deformation.
And they have a highlight/shadow painted into them, but when you look at it from different sides the shadow is correct only on one of them. But also, they suggest the idea that they are little holes. Why would a party hat have those
Maybe bigger circles? (again, careful with the stretching of those too)

Finally for the colours, I would personally choose a colour scheme (i.e. the shades of blue, or the shades of red) and enhance it with maybe one extra colour of your choice, to break the monotony. Right now there are 6-7 different colours, which I think is less appealing. These are very personal opinions!

 

Yes, that curved kind of stretching. I just used default unwrap option in blender and it unwraped UVs as in the photo below (in circular shape).

Then I painted the texture in Photoshop and then I can see the stretching on the Cap.
For the rings, they were initially circles until I perspective wraped them.

How will I fix it ????

Tried all UVs option & settings but cannot fix it. Also tried to project from Top orthographic view but this still persists.
I think this is because of the conical shape of cone (obviously, cone is conical).

 

You can probably fix the stretching on the dots by applying a fisheye filter to the dots layer (either with a positive or negative value), to introduce a deformation in the texture which is then countered by the UV projection.

 

I didn't want the Bard Hare to play music at the festival alone. So I created some musician hats and instruments for some of the villagers to represent the street performers. I need to fix a couple of things before requesting a pull request(along with the farmer's tools). I was thinking of making a drum, but I didn't want to make too many instruments.

I also created a Ruff Collar in case there is a villager that wanted to be poetic.

 

All of these are great!

A while back I suggested that Bard Hare is poetic (even have a few poems), how about making that work on his model too? Or are we set with his look?

 

These are soooo cool!!

(suggestion for everyone) For future items/caps etc. try not to make things that are too special or too caricatural. We're quickly going in a direction where every character is weird, in a certain way. Special and unique are fine, but if every character is "out of place", then I feel the town will feel disjointed.

To recap, on the fancy side we have: a mexican sombrero, Shakespear-inspired hat and collar, a birthday hat.

On the everyday side we have: some hairstyles, moustache and ear hair, a birthday hat, a farmer's hat, a wicker backpack-basket, glasses, earring, hammer, a frying pan, and the tableware and cutlery.

(am I forgetting something?)

What could we have which adds to the characters, without the need of being skinned? A belt? A "handyman tools" belt? Bracelets? A goatee/soul patch?

 

That sounds like a good idea. Should I still send a Pull Request for the Shakespeare-inspired hat/Ruff Collar, along with the other stuff?

 

You can, yes, or you can wait if you think you'll be making new assets soon!

 

Roger that. If I think about adding some more stuff, then I'll hold off the pull request until I'm done. Most likely before next week. Thank you @cirocontinisio

 

Here are some quick belts meshes I made. I still need to adjust the scale, but that should be about it. I'll send a pull request soon once all the models I have shown(Farmer Accessories - Belts) are ready.

For now, I think I'm done modeling accessories for the project. I might do more models(accessories and other stuff), but with school starting for me soon, it will be unlikely, which is why I'm finishing up and preparing for a pull request when ready.

 

Can we have hats or frills that look like Slurpuff for the Desserter character? Pastries are yummy!

 

She's on my list. Suggestions welcome!

So far I am thinking of lavender for her dress, long hair and a flower in her hair.

 

Here comes a first glimpse on the desserter - her hair is still missing - I hope in a few days I will have her walking in Unity too - right now she only walks in Blender.

 

Now the desserter walks but her hair doesn't follow... anyway this is how I intend she will look like. The flower in her hair is a vanilla orchid.

Desserter: 5018 triangles (few less than townfolk female as she wears no belt)
hair: 478 triangles, texture 1024x1024
vanilla orchid: 740 triangles, texture 128x512

 

Looks cool! I especially like the extra touch with the orchid.
My only issue is that the back of her hair is clipping with her headband.

 

I finally rigged the skirt of the old lady. Since I am using the details mask tint shader we can have the skirt in different color combinations.

 

Looks good, though she feels a bit out of place and feels very modern. Do you have the same impression?
I think the pattern on the skirt doesn't help, it's very elaborate and it looks printed - something you wouldn't expect from these people.

Honestly after all I wonder if we need that shader. The reality is that a shader like that would be good to create dozens of random variations. On the other hand, with different colour texture we would have much more fine control on the variation, which allows to paint different details on characters (like you did with the girl in the violet dress).

Looks good!

These are a bit too many!

 

So these people can melt iron (melting point 1538°C) but not wax (melting point bees wax 62-65 °C)? Batik was already known in ancient Egypt. It is done by putting wax on the cloth before dying it, this way the color can't get everywhere and leaves the pattern. The wax can be painted or printed - simply by putting a stamp in the molten wax and then on the cloth. I don't see why they shouldn't stamp the wax as it is much faster to cover great areas.

I typed "indigenous people" in Google and found many of them love to dress colorful.

 

What do you guys think about an ear cuff?



Of course, it could vary in length and design.

 

Great idea! We can combine it with other earrings (we only have one for now) to personalise a bit some characters.

In fact one thing I want to say: for these simpler models, it would be great to have variations which I imagine are relatively easy to make given you already have the base model, but will give us the ability to play with combinations. Simple, stupid example: given a ring-shaped earring, we can have a wide-and-thin one, small-and-chunky one, a mix, etc.

 

Do you want something like this?



All would be gold and the one at the very end will be the blue jewel that the townsfolk always wear(I will adjust it to match with the new art style). Oh yeah, and the second one are pearls, but I might only have one instead of 3.

 

Here are the earrings so far. I would add the 3rd one, but I saw that we already had one just like it. This might be my opinion, but do you think I should try changing how the shader is showing the ring. I'm using the other earring's shader, but I played around with it to make it not so bright. Unless there is anything else I need to change, I will submit these once I am done with the bridge and statue unless you want me to submit it now.

I don't know if it is necessary, but I can do different colors to do silver and gold rings.

 

I managed to somehow remove the streching of the UVs of PartyHat.



Please tell now @cirocontinisio, is this right now?

 

Given the long discussion on the townsfolks' fashion, I found a very interesting video about the oldest trousers found - including the description of patterns and weaving techniques used 3000 years ago.

youtube.com/watch?v=Pl7siWwzibs