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Halkun's 3D Arts
halkun
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Little model I'm whipping up for a game. She's sitting at around 3800 polys. (Many are still quads, so It's probably closer to the high 5000s when she's triangulated.) I've put in about 40 hours into it. I'm going to be UV mapping tomorrow and then rigging her up. I haven't chosen an engine yet as I'm still in the asset making phase.
Created with blander 2.5 - I may just make the game using blender's own game engine, but the game is *VERY* text heavy and there is next to no text management in Blender's engine.
I like Torque because it has an awesome scripting engine, but Torque export support was removed in Blender 2.5
Source would be better if it had scripting support. Recoding the engine just to tweak it is waaay overkill.
Crystalspace + CELStart? I donno.
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This is a project I started in 2007, but quit as I didn't have the skillz at the time. The is actually version 2 of the model. Version 1 has thankfully been lost to time. That one had over 68000 polys and I started with a Makehuman model. I made some pretty bad assumptions about video game models. (What do you mean they draw over the model with a skin? I have to learn how to use Photoshop too?")
The wireframe was done using a Japanese 3d sketch program called "Hexagreat 3D". Because of it's sketchy nature, the loop cuts are an after thought. I'll tell you right now the wireframe is a mess. It's actually much better than it was.
The game itself is a game to teach you Japanese. You are stuck on an island with her and she doesn't speak any English. You have to learn to survive. Lots of puzzles. I been throwing back and forth puzzle ideas with the Japanese staff at my old college.
It might be nothing, but it was sure fun to model her, and I've gotten tons better. I deviated from the original design a little. The bobbed hair made her look top-heavy. also, she was originally wearing a tank top, jacket and long skirt. In my original model, when I went to weight-paint the skirt I realized that modeling animated fabric was a royal pain in the ass. Simple shirt and miniskirt for the win.
The miniskirt is not merged with the rest of the body yet. (That's why you can see her body though the mesh) Ill be doing that tomorrow.
that is a really
really messy model
Have you ever taken a look at any professional done character models? They're built so that where the polys are they will deform properly for animation. All of those bizarre tris everywhere will make it so that when you go to animate her, shit will go crazy and ugly.
I mean. Her eye isn't even separate geo. How are you going to make her blink? Have you tried throwing a basic rig into her yet? That will make the problems very apparent. You can spend forever weight painting her to try and make shit look right, or you can re-topo her. I advise re-topoing her because damn. You should stick to quads. Draw lines down and around her, how you'd like her to deform, where you need room to bend. Then when you re-topo, take that into account. I know this is your first model, but if you try to go through an entire game using this model, you will be very cross with yourself at the end of it
As for the eyes, there is a strange problem when making anime eyes in 3d. Namely, anime eyeballs don't fit into and anime skull. I found this out the very hard way with v1 of my model. If you make the eyes big enough so they are not bulging out of the eye sockets, the edges are poking out at the ears. A technique I picked up is you make the eye flat or slightly curved and you animate the UV under it. It's a little odd, but my tests in the past have worked great.
I'll update tonight.
Make a separate plane with the eye under it, at least. Unless you're going to animate eyelids into that UV you are giving yourself a LOT of unnecessary grief.
It was a matter of the company being in europe and me being unemployed at the time. I now have a "real job" and doing this as a hobby
That being:
Twitter
I am by no means a great artist but I would recommend maybe grabbing the free versions of either 3ds max or maya, and picking up a character creator book to give you some good habits when creating a character.
http://www.amazon.com/Model-Rig-Animate-3ds-max/dp/0321321782/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1313620351&sr=8-3 is a link to a book I had used several years ago, which gave some decent fundamentals since it took you step by step through the process of creating the character, rigging, and animating him. This might be a good idea for you to try first and then move onto your first original character.
this is what happened to the first character I tried to rig and animate:
Nonono, don't get me wrong. I picked it up and put it down 4 years ago. I recently picked up the new Blender and I've completely fallen in love it. After devouring a whole bunch of tutorials and books, I decided to start modeling again. When I was looking for a subject to model on my own, I looked into my archives and found this old thing and got hit by a spark in inspiration. My current goal is to model it, UV map it, and then make a walk cycle. That's the end of it, but it will also put me in to a position to import it into a game engine if I feel like it. Digging about I found my old notes on the game and thinking "what the hell".
May be nothing, may be something. I'm just having a blast. It's looking sooo good and so much better than my last run years ago. Maybe I got a little more wise, I don't know. Man, If I could show you the original models, you would think it's a massive improvement.
Anyway, I'm listening to your critiques, I decided to hold off on UV mapping and work on doing a re-topo of the model. Kochikens gave me the idea to look as some professional game models to get some ideas. When I get to the head I'll look into the eye. I'll pick apart the model for Miku Miku Dance and see how that's rigged up and steal study the rigging (especially for the eyes) to see what can be useful.
Miniskirt has been merged. The feet suck, but they are just shaped so weird, I can't help but to get triangles in there. Most of it will be hidden by shoe anyway. I put a lot of loops in the knee joints and that helped the deformations massively, the ankles can use a few loops though and I can probably consolidate a few triangles in the process . I might give that a go. Also I might be subdeviding the skirt and top too much, but she does need to bend at the waist and rotate her back, so maybe not. I haven't gotten the arm yet bit that will be fixed much like the legs.
Better?
no
that shoulder, that chest, they are Not good. Neither is the foot. Don't make excuses. Fix them! You still aren't thinking with deformations. Throwing in a crapton of edgeloops does not mean you're going to have a good time animating.
That page on articulation GurtPerk posted looks like a really great resource, I'd take a close look at that, especially for the shoulder area. I can see that some of the tris have come about because you're trying to consolidate edge loops, but that's not the best way to do that. I'll post up some sketches/draw-overs as soon as I can to show that you can pull a couple of loops together and still wind up with quads. You can see some examples of this most obviously on the hands shown on that same hippydrome page.
I'd suggest that you start over for the upper body. This might seem extreme, but I'm not sure whether trying to tidy up what you've already got is the most time efficient way to fix problem areas like the shoulder and the chest. If you're going to be keeping it low poly, then I think a fresh start would be the fastest way and you'd probably learn more solid modelling techniques by doing that then you would trying to rescue what you've got. The legs and feet aren't as much of an issue, you could fix those up relatively easily from the looks of things here. I'd need to post a wee draw-over to show you how I'd go about it, which I'll try to do as soon as!
Keep going though! Modelling, especially organic modelling, can be really tricky and it takes time to learn. The important thing is not to get too discouraged at the start of a project like this, you'll learn little tricks and techniques that you can apply to future projects, so it's all valuable experience.
Comics
I forgot to mention I was only done from ankle to waist. I didn't do the chest, shoulders, arms or head yet. I ran out of time and had to go to bed. Also I found that I can re-loop the model pretty easy. The upper body isn't a total wash, but I can work with what I got.
Tonight I'm going to start with some good loops and re-topo in these areas. The shoulder loop is icky, but workable, same with the ankle. Those will get fixed.
Fixed ankle in the feet, and made good progress in re-doing the chest. The shoulder needs to be fixed, possibly re-extruded from the body. Head is still untouched. I can collapse the polygons if I'm making too many. They are fun to fidget with so I can get shapes right.
May re-do the breast.
Is it progress? I feel like I'm learning a lot!
After all my loops are done I can "pull" one loop into another and drop the count and then "pull" the other loops to take up the gap where old one used to be. It's waging in a 3000 faces right now. I've budgeted for 6 so after the mirror apply, I should be hitting that. When looking at blender tutorials they pull edge loops at the joints. It's true that the sims models have really only one or two loops at the joints, but that's also sims 2, an older game, and they look like straight tubes. for arms in kind of a "T" pose. I'm more going for shape and I guess can pull the loops together when I'm done. Is that a good plan?
Here's pretty much my final draft...
I almost completely re-did the hands, and cleaned up the face. I tossed out a whole bunch of loops on the body. In the end, including the hair and shoes, the model weighs in at ~8300 triangles. About the same as Alex Vance from HL2. I am very happy with this, and worlds better than what I started with. It's not perfect, but as it's only the 4th human model I've ever made and even then after a 4 year hiatus, I'm ecstatic.
I'll do the final object merge tomorrow. The eyes will be held off on until I can find a good rigging solution for them. Then comes the UV seaming and the start of the UV maps.