Base Character Project from Arteria3d

I need some feedback community...

I get asked so many times for a base male/female RPG character. The aproach on this has always spun my mind into spirals, on the best way to do this and now im ready to start....

So.. lets take this scenario

Does the base human character have clothes, or just underwear? If this is so, do we then need to mesh swap out for chunkier more defined clothes?(and would these alternative meshes be grouped all on the same model that i animate, and then in unity the groups depicting the mesh vfariations are shown or hidden as needed?

On the subject of armour, this is relatively easy to attach armour segments to shoulders in game, chest etc

Any forum goers who contribute to this thread, will get a discount when the pack is released. Im also considering starting a preorder on this, whereby customers sign up, and have an input on armour/clothing/heads etc and get at a reduced price also - let me know if there is interest on this idea.

Best wishes

Steve, Arteria3d
http://www.arteria3d.com

 

The way I would do it is model a character in 4 parts.

Head, torso (including arms), legs and boots. Through out my workflow, I would guarantee that the vertices line up perfectly at those 4 joints. Then, I would create different variations of those 4 parts, with different textures.

 

Thanks for the input andorov

So we have 4 body elements - so say we have 5 variations of 4 body sections - would you then animate this as one, with all the groups separate, so that then, in unity the parts required would be shown, or hidden as needed?

Steve

 

From what ive seen in most mmorpg's is the only mesh thats actually changed is the head model. Take a look at wow for example, if you play around with anything other than the face nothing changes except the textures on the mesh(i.e skin color). Every base character model in wow has a set of clothes textured to the model depending on the characters armor and if hes not wearing any its just his underwear. The only things that actually change mesh are the head and the hair. in that case you could just create multiple variations of bald heads for the models, hair styles can be applied like you would equip a helm and the features like eyes can be changed via texture/skin rather than actually modeling those features.

 

But wouldnt the limitation of just one body mesh be very limiting so it looks like he has a skin tight suit on? What about when the character should be wearing trousers, or a baggt top?

Steve

 

the simpler the mesh the more customizable it can be thats the point the point of the pack would be a base model that comes with a few peices of armor as reference and the people who purchase it will be responsible for any extra armor that they want etc. if you add extra details like a baggy top it will be harder to fit armor over that unless its a seperate part from the torso.

 

Exactly.

You need character from many parts + equipment (head, eyes, wrist, elbow.....). Than you stitch these parts + equipment on the fly to one skinned mesh by script. It gives you flexibility to optimize, for example I will not use legs, when I have full plate legs on character....etc...So point is to devide character to as many parts as is feasible. This is ONLY serious approach for good modern game if you want to have good performance and nice graphics + flexibility. WOW and such S*** is not good example, it is 10 years old game and it is graphically obsolete.

But generally I wouldnt care about this. This is throwing pearls to pigs. Just make some nice model (naked torso with two versions of texture - naked + underwear) and nice equip.People who know how to make games can always split it in parts and rest will be happy with their never published casual made from one character and black cube as enemy

 

Demo, but surely we would need a version with baggy clothes, as naked is quite limiting(or skin suit rather)?
Also.. this would all be animated as one model in my 3d app wouldnt it, and just hidden/shown on request in unity?

Thanks for the input

Steve

 

Cloths are of course separate mesh.It can be done as one model with 50 subparts and disable/enable according to need, but this is not best solution from the point of speed. Better is to separate everyhing (each part is separate model) and stich on the fly by script. But as I told, this is not solution for newbies and majority of people here.

 

This can be a whole market for you, Steve. You can have base male and female naked underwear and sell clothing, armour, modern clothing, medieval, etc seperately and then heads and seperate hair styles seperately.

Demostenes, can you give an example of a game that presents this many pieces well? I'm thinking of Morrowind and it looked horrid until Better Bodies came along. Oblivion uses the head and bodies method. I've not done clothing for Fallout.

I'm wondering if Andorov's 4 piece idea would be simpler and easier for Steve to sell clothing sets to go with his base models (should he choose that direction).

 

Sure, this is how it is done. Nothing new. Very good business model. Look at DAZ3D. You can even separate animations to extra file (fbx), so you can easily add them...

Each modern RPG? It does not matter if piece is hand, or part of armor. From the scripting point of view no difference. And i would bet, that if you dress for example full plate armor, there is NO body under. Why render thousands of invisible polygons.....With such system you can have 15k+ poly characteres without any problem.

 

I've not seen anything like that on the indie game market as I wanted that for my own game.

You can see the joints (3D art nudity warning) http://webpages.charter.net/manauser/morrowind/images/NewClothes1.jpg around the hips and shoulders mostly. I mentioned this concept to an artist I was going to pay to do characters for me and they protested it would look bad and refused to do it. They insisted on doing one mesh per clothing set and swap entire characters depending on what clothing you would wear.

 

The way i thought this may work, , was that the whole base character would be imported into XSI(i use this to rig), and all the sub meshes - for example, 4 sets of armour, 4 whole body clothing variations - and these would all be attached to the rig, and enveloped smoothly as one whole unity(but sep groups)- then this would be exported as FBX with all the sub groups entact - then the customer wouId import this whole model into unity, and then the parts hidden or shown what they need.

If i was to sell for example a whole new body set - how would the customer merge this onto the base rig? Wouldnt it only be items like shoulder parts, wrist armour etc, that could be sold or provided separate as these are easy to just attach to a bone in game.

I really apreciate all the feedback here. Its fueling my creative fire!

Steve

 

I think the best option would be to offer different skins for the models like medieval and modern etc and then offer armor packs for the models (medieval armor or modern clothes etc...) you could also offer different style hair and heads. This would be the most universal solution rather than splitting the character up into body parts that are interchangeable(not sure if you could swap out body parts without having to re rig the model).

 

As far as armor is concerned, if there's a model for say shoulder armor, can't we just make it a child of the shoulder object in the Unity hierarchy?

 

That works fine for stuff that's stiff and doesn't deform at all. So a shield or sword or solid metal shoulder armor works fine. But for things like leather armor that flex and bend with the character, it needs to be weighted at a minimum, and usually is animated with the main character and just disabled when not worn.

Doing the model with interchangeable parts and combining them at runtime into the desired mesh is a possible approach, but would require a lot of thought to make it work smoothly. Just speaking off the top of my head (so I'm probably missing a bunch of stuff), you'd likely need a custom exporter/importer to pass weighting data for each of the vertexes of each of the optional mesh components so the runtime binder could bind it properly. I guess optionally you could export the whole armature with each of the components and have the runtime scripts take the weighting data from those when it does the mesh combining. Hmm, actually may have to mess around with that approach a little bit and see how it goes.

But the way I've typically seen it done, and that I know works, is just to have all the components on the main character and hide the ones that aren't currently being worn.

 

Yes, I think this would be an awesome idea. (I'm one of the many who suggested it )

The way they do it in WoW is that there is the base body mesh which is used for the underwear or for skin tight outfits. Then there are multiple variations of different armor meshes that are all built onto the same skeleton. So if you look at a WoW model in an editor, you will see all the different types of armor meshes all piled on top of each other. When you're actually in-game, it turns off every armor mesh except the one you're actually wearing. I think they do it this way so that they can have the pieces of the armor rigged slightly differently to the skeleton, so that they can flex with the skeletal animation.

The other way to do it is to just have the base underwear model and add meshes onto the specific bones of the body for each different piece, like upper arm, lower arm, shoulder, etc. This works well for solid metal armor but it doesn't look right for flexible armor or cloth because it won't have the skeletal weights built in.

I'm sure there are other ways to do it as well but I'm not that familiar.

 

Good approach for small game, nonsense for anything big. You really dont want to have 500 pieces of equipment in one file.

 

They should learn how to rig properly. It is no problem to have character made from pieces and have no chance to find seams. I have character assembled from 6 parts and it looks like one mesh. No problem at all if you do it properly.

 

HI Demo

Im confused - we established separate meshes would be required for the base CHUNKIER clothing, rather than skin suit, but then your saying that a model with all these layers on as groups would be wrong? Its ok for elements like armour on shoulders to be added later by the user in game, but for meshes of the body type, they would need to be rigged as part of one global model and for example when i did an upgrade on the model for the next set oif body meshes, i would then re-export the whole rig again with this new additon on

Steve

 

1) I make naked body, divide in parts, rig on skeleton
2) I make equip, rig on same skeleton
3) I prepare animations for this skeleton
4) I have each part/piece of equip as separate fbx, each animation is as separate fbx too

During runtime I took all parts I need, load animations I need and stitch it by script to one skinned mesh. If there is any change, I rebuild this mesh on the fly. Thanks to it i have always 1 skinned mesh for character, but I am very flexible. I can have dozens of equipable parts for charater, I can even optimize speed by not loading covered body parts. This is way how AAA game should work.

Unity character creaton example is similar, with one difference, all parts/euqip are in one mesh. OK for such simple model, nonsense for real game, where you have dozens of animations, armor, etc....try to load 300MB fbx file....

 

Hi Demo - so for PART 2 as above - this would where the cunkier clothing elements would reside

So a heirachy could be:

1 Base Mesh
2 Baggy Clothes
3 Armour
4 Addon Shoulder/wrist armour (clipon elements)

I think this is forming a concrete way to do this

Steve

 

I see no hierachy there. From my point of view all parts are on same level. Just piece of whole puzzle. And i only pick, which parts i want to use. I need knight? I pick all parts of full plate mail and head (only visible part through helmet). I need naked woman? I take all body parts...etc

 

Hi Steve,

Just to chime in, I was always impressed by the way Frogames with CS:Warriors and Commoners handled customizable characters. A combination of a couple of base meshes, a lot of textures and some various meshes like beards, hats and equipment.

http://www.frogames.net/content-packs/cs-warriors-and-commoners.html
http://www.frogames.net/Christophe/CSWC/reference.html

For a couple of years there was talk of new packs coming with female characters and things like wizards, but it seems that has never happened in the end.

As World of Warcraft is mentioned here, I love the focus on beautiful textures instead of high-poly models in Blizzard games. I personally enjoy the look of a low-poly model with a nice hand-painted texture more than those ultra high-poly models with highly detailed textures. But you know, that's something personal. Although if you look at mobile devices, having some great customizable low-poly models wouldn't be such a bad idea if I may say so.

The Warriors and Commoners pack has two base models, one muscular and one fat. All textures, animations and addon meshes work on these base models. I think if you would do it in a similar way, you can quickly create all kinds of packs and awesomeness with a lot of variety. As you were talking about RPG characters, you can release an "Elves" pack for example, which would include elf textures with pointy ears and leafy armor and also special "Elvish" equipment like bows. And maybe even Elf specific animations (if there is such a thing). A new base model could be introduced for something like a dwarf or an orc, but maybe just scaling those would do it. I don't have enough modeling knowledge to answer that one correctly. And off course creating something like cowboys or zombies would be as "simple" as choosing on which base models they have to work, adding a couple of textures and animations and boom! (Yes, including a real implosion™!)

Well, those are my two cents!

Edit:
It seems that 3DRT has done something similar recently.
http://3drt.com/3dm/characters/peasants-construction-kit/fantasy-peasants-construction-set-shots.htm

 

Steve, someone one the previous page mentioned that splitting and combining meshes is not for noobs right, well i have a very simply answer to your question...

Look at the Character Customisation Demo that Unity provides. It does almost what you said you had in mind. They load the entire character into one FBX complete with each separate top, bottom, head, eyes and shoes then they save a list of what parts are in the file and saves each separate part as an asset on it's own.

So your life is made extremely simple, now. Just build you models as separate pieces inside a single file and use the existing Demo;s code to split the model up. use the existing demo to let people customise their characters and this way you can make life easy for noobs and experienced people alike!

Half of the work has already been done for you (coding and presentation) so all that is left for you to do is confirm to their standard and just push as much content as possible...

 

I'm not really very knowledgeable in this area so I don't have a lot to add. However, there is a free skeleton pack on the asset store that takes the approach of having a single base model of a skeleton with no clothing and then provides some simple clothing such as hats, cloaks, armour and weapons as separate fbx files that you can then link together in Unity. This was pretty simple to use from a developer's perspective though I have no idea if this is the most efficietn method.

 

I agree with Cubez. Personally, I like the looks of a hand-painted texture vs. super high detailed mesh. And considering a lot (based on my observations) of the users here are working on mobile apps, a low-poly solution like Cubez mentioned might be the way to go. I know Everquest 1 used texture swapping to represent the various pieces of worn armor and clothing (the mesh had texture groups I believe). So, after creating the base mesh, you could release texture packs for the mesh (like Cubez said).

You could always create the high-poly version for the "AAA" crowd as well as a separate pack, just a thought.

 

SO you think initially go with an almost WOW texture style pack?
IN that there are no mesh swapping (except for heads and addon armour pieces), but all textures are hand drawn, almost cartoonish in style

Steve

 

It depends on your target audience. If you target for S***ty games, kid games, iphone casuals etc... then yes. Otherwise NO.

 

im still divided!! Part of me actually liked the idea of doing that kind of pack also, maybe to guide me into this style of pack. I did the cartoon pack a few years ago and whilst something i create along a WOW line wont be terrible cartoon in style, the move away from photoreal for a project might be fund and inventive

STeve

 

You should stick to the same style as your medieval packs and modern packs. This would give returning customers and new customers a full solution to their art needs. Adding a cartoon version could be another addon.

 

I think the export as one FBX file with all the body parts in, is probably the way to do this for a photoreal kind of pack probably.

 

I think you are correct, at least for most of us. I would suggest including different hair models in addition to different head models, though. I prefer non-photoreal. Wow is fine, but I would prefer less cartoonish. Whatever the case is, the textures are my least worry, those are easy to modify. It's all the models, and the rigging that I'm hoping to get out of this.
Oh, and please make at least a male and female version. it's a lot of work, true, but an all-male world would really be sad.

 

As long as the model is made from separate parts, there is not big difference if you distrubute it in one file, or separate files.

 

+1

 

+2

 

Are you thinking of doing this, Steve? http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t2Ggto_vfJc/0.jpg See lower left box with the character image and seperate clothing pieces. Apologize for the smallness of the pic. I'm locked out of the gaming stuff at work. You can see seperate pauldrons, gauntlets, bracers for each side left and right (are all seperate), then you have greives, boots, cuirass and helmet. There's 10 pieces for one armour set. (The pualdrons, gauntlets, bracers can be mirrored in the modeler for the opposite side.)

 

Yes

The one thing which goes back to demo's comments about stiching is that the areas around the shoulders are going to have to be the same on every single character addon, so that things gel smoothly.

Steve

 

I've seen holes around shoulder and thigh/waist areas and clipping on some clothing in RPG's. Those seem to be trouble spots.

Maybe you can use the scripting from the official Unity demo to test with and also put it in your unitypackage with the clothing set. http://unity3d.com/support/resources/example-projects/charactercustomization

 

If it will be a naked rpg character, I will get it.

 

3DRT's fantasy warrior is a decent enough way to do it, and seems to work fine in free Unity. I'd just like more component variations and less ugly faces

 

I would definitely prefer if you stick with your current style, Steve. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with on this one.

 

Steve character like this will be my priority number one! If you prepare a lots of variations I will buy it....

So you can count one customer!

 

This is how I see things. Great idea!

Different textures for different parts.

Only the skit is separate mesh.

 

Hmmm, that's a little harsh. The point I was trying to make is that lower poly models can look as awesome as higher poly models with some nice textures. Wow was used as an example for low-poly high quality texture, but that doesn't mean the cartoony style of WoW's textures should be copied. Lower poly will be more mobile friendly especially if you want more models on screen, and that is what I am interested in, so that's why I brought it up.

But I guess as someone grown up in the 2D era I'm biased. Create what you want to create Steve, I'm only saying that good textures can make a lot of nice variety and won't have to look "cartoony" by definition.

 

i think its great idea your planning on making a char pack..
Your models are detailed and look more pro. then most packs for the price.
I really like the frog games commoners pack, because what it offers, But the faces seem to be to low ploy or textured.

Not to derail this post.
but if your looking for pack to create, i would say a critter/monster pack.
U have alot mid evil packs for rpg/mmo style.
And it seems alot people including myself wanting to make rpg.
But there is little to none enemy packs unless to buy a zombie, skeleton, goblin, or Orc pack..
There's nothing i can find with different mobs

I'm sure if you made a pack with 10-15 different enemy's say with 2-3 different skins it will sell.
Enemy's like you would kill in Wow for example..
Wolf, Bat, venus fly trap, scorpion, bear, tiger, snake, spider, troll, orc, goblin, skeleton, dear, pig, etc...

they would need simple animations like:
idie, walk, run, one or two attacks, death

Just an idea i had..
jay

 

Thanks for all the input - i will be starting the project tomorrow!
Also later today im releasing a Monk Character complete with martial arts animations

Steve

 

Hey Steve, I'd just like to chime in on the point about monsters and such. If you find this method works really well for human characters, please give it a try for some other races such as Orcs, Goblins, Trolls, etc. Combined with your other models, your site could then be a one-stop shop for all things RPG.

 

To be honest it would be the only one stop shop for all things rpg lol, i've looked everywhere for something that will fully satisfy the needs of an rpg and the only place that had most of what i needed was Arteria. Heres another suggestion steve, you could make all bodys of male and female characters including other races exactly the same.

For instance look at world of warcraft and how pretty much any armor will fit on any race in world of warcraft, i believe this to be that every single race has the same rig just some races have different animations. So you could completly release a new race other than human such as orc for example and all you would have to do is use the same rig for animations/armature just different body parts as Demonstones stated that we can stich together via script. Another reason i believe this is how blizzard does it is if you look at the gryphon animation for the alliance flying mounts and then look at the animation for the winged guardian mount which is bought in the blizzard store, they have exactly the same animations just different mesh

 

I wonder if this should be a seperate membership than his other sites as it is a different animal. That way, those of us who are purchasing these types of models vs the full one piece characters. It would probably be easier to shop at Arteria's store if he had different sections - hair, heads, armour, scifi, clothing, etc. Once Steve gets going, he's going to have a lot of stuff.

Add vampires and werewolves to the monsters set.