Time for another Fun-Project ( FunProjo Series ). This time I came around a guy which most probably many of you know ( and hate ). It’s from a game franchise called Pokémon which is amongst game developers a little miracle in that it violates many Good Practice rules and should be a failure but yet it’s loved mad like pie… that said WoW violates them too but you see the unholy results
Those knowing the FunProjo Series know that I’m always linking a Goal to a project. This time the goal has been two-fold. The first is Proper Mesh Loops / Topology. I used this to improved on my mesh topology skills. There are still some places where I could not get around triangles somehow ( and places where I wanted them ). Fell free to check out the wire render to give crits on what could be done better ( click for large image ).
This guy is currently fully modeled ( except the eyes ), has no texture but it fully rigged. You can also watch a rotation view of the model ( use “gmplayer charizard_rotation.avi -loop 0” to play it looped ). Otherwise a combined image ( click for large view ).
The second goal is still ahead. This guy is missing the flame on the tail. In early game making this has been done using an animated texture on a double-sided billboard. There is though a second possible solution for such a situation nowadays: particle engines. Hence the second goal is going to be learning the Blender Particle System to smack a flame where one should be.
Wow this looks great. I can’t believe there have been no other responses yet on this. Will be cool to see it texture. However, it is neat as is. It looks like a really angry chocolate dragon.
p.s. now that I have used the word dragoon I will await CD’s response.
In fact, according to the creators of this guy it’s not a dragon. It has type “Fire” and “Flying”… that said I would consider this more worthy of “Dragon” type than some other… mishaped… things that got this tag.
By the way if somebody wants to see a wire close-up for better crits just tell me so I can add things.
Charizard in the TV series would’ve looked 5 times better if they showed him with a mouthful of sharp Dragon teeth instead of just the 4 they usually show.
I do agree that some they classify as ‘Dragon’ type is a bit iffy, some have so little resemblence to an actual Dragon form I can’t see them as Dragons.
I guess this is mostly since it’s a kids game so they left it out. After all they have a special take on this franchise. One remarkable point is that no poke really dies. They have this entire battle stuff but swiftly left this topic aside. This is especially astonishing since Japanese cartoons/games have a tendency to high gore, violence and sex yet still this one is totally off this tradition.
Eventually got around to tackle the second part of the story: the Particle Engine. I’m though not really fond of the results. I’m not sure though if this is because of limitations in Blender’s support for particles or me missing the options. First the particles are too big. They have to be smaller but more of them. Second particles should be able to undergo texture transformation. What this means is that currently a particle gets a texture coordinate assigned depending on where it leaves the emitter mesh and keeps this until the end of time. What I want though is that the particle texture coordinates moves along the texture so the particle starts out bright white and becomes dark red while fading out towards the end of it’s life. Currently it’s a bengalian torch not much of a fire after all. Any suggestions on how to improve on this? My first touch on the particle system in blender by the way.
A little animation to to move the tail around a bit. Is it just me or does blender have troubles synching? The emitter mesh on the tail end is attached to the tail tip bone. It’s all correct in the editing preview just in animation-rendering it gives this strange look.
By the way… is it somehow possible to avoid having to start half a second earlier in the animation since the particle emitter always starts at the start of the animation instead of having like already run imaginary for half a second to avoid this “wind up” time?
Maybe you could try the fire tutorial from blenderart 16. The only problem would be that you need to use nodes and I’m not sure if you can apply them to only one element of a model.
I’ll take a look at it. The emitter mesh by the way is a separate small mesh just aligned with the tail tip so this should not be a problem ( it has exactly one material for all faces in there ).
Gave this guy a little texture. The wings have a nice diffuse shading applied which is hard to see in the high polygon version. Would look better in a low-profile light scene as for example on a weak console. That said I’ve made better skins up to now but I’m also not very good at it . Image and Rotation Video as always.
I noted a really good tutorial for still rendering of fire, it was here http://www.raivestudios.com/tutorials/blender/fire/. Simple and effective. Theres other fire tutorials floating round for blender, google them. The particle systems tricky with fire, but if you use the nodes and particles right, it can come out really nicely.
I noticed those tutorials around. I might get into them once more but I’m a bit smacking a wall there. Particle systems in games are somewhat easier to use. That said this is usually done using billboards but for learning I used the particles… well… I tried I should say <.=.<
. Image and 