Cervator said:
Poked about this topic a little on IRC again, but just to get something in the thread - yeah, I figured it'd be too easy to just get at a poly count etc, alas
AW - would you mind posting your full "design sheet" to see if others like it / can agree with it / tweak it?
Beyond that, I suppose we need a "feel" for the art - which yeah, again probably isn't as simple as "thin", "thick", "rangly" etc since all those vary by the model... would more examples help us at all?
On the two dwarves styling differently then yeah, I hadn't thought much about the differing details like slightly floating arms and such. I sort of like how the first one ("Jake") has sort of a distinct style to it, yet the second one might be more standard'ish yet more versatile?
Wow, better late than never? Right? Hope so anyway.
First off, I have to agree with what glasz said a couple posts up. An art pipeline will have to come, but right now just doing concept stuff to get stuff sorted out would be good.
Second, my personal guidelines for making my dwarf aren't that complex and will (probably) change. I'll go ahead and give a quick overview of them anyway. They might serve to demonstrate some of the aspects of making unified art assets.
For this dwarf model, there were only two aspects I considered. Modeling and texturing. At the very least, rigging and animation guidelines will have to be added I should think (eventually). Modeling will probably gain more guidelines in the future also, such as whether they should be in multiple objects, naming conventions, etc, etc. Texturing on the other hand should be fairly simple, right off the bat I can't think of anything that would need added. Anyway, here goes (I've attached a referance image for... well... reference
).
Note 1: I use 'character' throughout just to mean a non-block object I guess. 'Entity' may be better?
Modeling (Top left of image)
- The first thing I decided, was to use axis aligned cuboids only. This was just a personal preference, and is something that very well may change. It may be nice having the freedom to model with slopes and other shapes, though it would result in a much greater variety in model quality which would have to be watched.
- You'll notice second that I kept all dimensions in perfect pixel measurements. I personally like the "voxelly" look this gives the model and since I was using axis aligned cuboids, I felt it was fitting. It could be disregarded though if finer detail was needed, and if models are ever made with non-cuboid shapes, obviously this would be impossible to hold to.
- You can't see it, but I also deleted all the faces that absolutely would never be seen, like the back of his eyes and the bottom of his leg in the boot. (At least I think they'll never be seen, are eyes going to be popping out? )
Note: UV unwrapping is kind of a modeling issue, but I put it in the texturing section.
Texturing (Top right and bottom half)
- I set myself a 128x128 px texture. Much bigger, than say, a Mineraft character skin, but still puny (see the little postage stamp with 1x on it). The reason I did that is because the model is much more detailed than say Mineraft's Steve, and because it was really the smallest normally square image that I could nicely fit the UV unwrap on. If you want a mess of squares on your UV map I could definitely fit on smaller though. Texture size may vary though. I would kind of doubt that every creature we put in the game will optimally fit on a texture of this size.
- The rest of this is mostly about UVs. First, in the top right you'll see the 3d unwrapping scheme I settled on. I hope the image explains it. This is directly related with how they are laid out on the texture.
- In the magnified texture image, you'll see the UVs flattened. I wanted it to be as easy as possible to make new 'skins' for a character. With my hastily drawn letters, see how the polys relate to the 3d model. (F=front the direction the character would walk in this case B=back, S=side, T=top, Bm=bottom)
You'll see how each part of the model is unwrapped into a minimum of separate pieces, the max is three in this case (the beard), and that they are easy to texture. They are all oriented in the correct way, with a hopefully easy to see relation to the model (the sides, top, and bottom are connected to the front and either the far left or right of the cross-shaped piece is the back). I also laid all the islands out in roughly the same order as they appear on the model, helmet near top, head, torso with the arms on either side, etc. Just looking at the texture should give you an idea of what everything is. All this may not always be possible, but striving for it would be nice as it would be much more friendly to those wanting to make new skins.
Well, there you are, hopefully you see some of the stuff I was thinking about when I said some guidelines would be good. These, of course, are just the ones I set for myself in making that model.
@glasz
I like your concept art in a certain way. I'm going to be honest though (I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I like your drawings), the floating appendages just aren't my thing. I mean, the arms and legs of my model aren't "connected" per say, but they give that impression I think. I like your designs, I just think that pure floating arms and stuff would look kind of weird in the game
as a standard. That's not to say there couldn't be certain monsters with floating "pieces".
