Making My Own 3D Characters

I know very little about 3D art/character creation. I am wondering if it is difficult to take a completed 3D asset with the desired animations (idle, attack, death etc.) and simply change the art/skin of the thing. Sort of like cloning it in a 3D app like Blender and making my own characters using the original as a template for my games.

Is this difficult or time consuming? Does anyone know of tutorials that would help me? Thanks.

 

Unity makes it relatively easy.

Short answer: Use humanoid retargeting.

Long answer:

A 3D model consists of two basic parts: the mesh (i.e., the skin) and the rig (i.e., the skeleton). The rig is a hierarchy of bones. Very roughly speaking, each bone is tied to part of the mesh. If the left arm bone moves, the left arm part of the mesh follows it. Not every model has a rig. For example, a non-animated rock might only have a mesh.

There are two common ways to animate a model:

• Blend shapes (aka morphing) deforms the mesh. This is often used for facial animation.
• Skeletal animation moves the rig.

The act of adding a rig to a 3D model is called rigging. Blender has an automatic rigging feature called Rigify. (BTW, in Blender, rigs are called armatures.)

Historically, skeletal animation has been tied to a specific rig. For example, say you have an Orc with this rig:

• Pelvis
  • LeftLeg
  • RightLeg
  • Spine
    • LeftArm
    • RightArm

The animation will specify rotations such as "move LeftArm 90 degrees".

If you have an Elf with this rig:

• hips
  • left_thigh
    • left_foot
  • right_thigh
    • right_foot
  • spine0
    • spine1
      • left_arm
        • left_hand
      • right_arm
        • right_hand

Then the animation that specifies "move LeftArm 90 degrees" won't work on it.

However, Unity's Mecanim animation system has a mode called "Humanoid". In this mode, Unity converts each model and animation into a "universal" rig, allowing just about any animation to play on any humanoid rig.

To sum up some of your options:

• Use Blender to customize 3D models and/or rig them. Blender has a big library of tutorials.
  
• Or use a Unity system such as UMA. (There are others on the Asset Store, too.)
  
• Or use a third party product such as Adobe Mixamo's Fuse.
• Get free and paid animation clips from the Asset Store, such as Raw Mocap Data.

For custom models, using 3D modeling software such as Blender gives you the most options, but it's also the most time-consuming to learn.

 

Wow thanks for such an involved reply, TonyLi!

So I guess what I'm looking for and to rephrase my original post:

I have a good working model. I don't want to change any animation or rigging or have concern with morphing.

I only want to change the mesh artwork. I don't know 3D modeling but I do know graphics and this is what I'm trying to accomplish, taking clones and customizing the mesh/art to create new 3D models.

Does this makes sense or sound doable? Will tweaking mesh files break the 3D model or animations? If I do so, will the changes effect all of the clones or will I be able to make new stand alone models?

 

That's kind of what I figured, but it does require some knowledge about rigging.

You can retexture (change the image that's applied to) an existing mesh without any rigging or animation issues.

You can customize the existing mesh by modifying the polygons it's made of. But, since the rigging weights are based on the original mesh, the new mesh might not look quite right when animated.

Finally, you can remove the existing mesh and add a new mesh, but you have to rig it to the skeleton's bones. Otherwise when the animation moves the skeleton's bones the mesh won't follow -- i.e., it won't animate.

 

Thanks again. I've been able to make slight changes but big ones are going to take more time. It may be the layers on the model I'm using though.

 

Glad I could help from my limited perspective as a non-artist. If you get stuck on the big changes, maybe some of the talented artists who frequent this forum could lend an idea or two.

 

ok thanks a lot for you help.
what about 2D games, is any software to get export from it and how to make animate before importing to Unity.

 

This is a thread about something entirely different from 2 years ago. Please make a new thread to ask about this instead of necro-ing an old unrelated thread.

 

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