Ok, this is the start of my next BGE project, which I’m sure you will all enjoy when finished. My first step however is to design the character I want to use. I have a lot of character modeling and rigging experience, but I never really modeled on a low poly limit before. So, I referred to some nicely done documentation from Mr_Bomb (the god of character modeling in my opinion), and thought I would show you some of my progress on this character. I’ve taken some of Jonathan’s advice, and mixed it with some of my own techniques and I think it’s coming along rather nicely . . . except he has no head yet, but I’m working on it. I posted two images, both are the same except one is black to accentuate the wire-frame a bit to see the topology of the mesh.
Added a head to him, and still tweaking it a bit. I’ll probably add ears too, but for the most part he’s almost finished with modeling. I’ll start on the texturing and rigging next.
The rig is done, but I gotta work on the weight painting yet. I was manually doing the painting, but it looks like new “Bone Heat Weighting” (http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/skinning/) in the svn might be more useful for me right now. Since Blender won’t compile yet on my mac using Leopard, I’m looking for a an OSX 10.5 build from the svn to test this out with. I’ll let you know how well it works.
weight painting doesn’t work in GE…? What chu talking bout Willis?
I know it did back in 2.41 and I doubt thats changed. I would weight paint some parts of limbs to a more root bone to keep there main bone’s influence down if I needed to.
I’m slightly confused by this, could you explain a little more as to why Weight Paining wont work in the GE? Every Armature bone has a vertex group assigned to it, which tells the bone which verticies need moved, and the weight of the vertex determines how much of an influence a bone has to move it. This is how skinning works. I’m very thrown off that you would say that, because you’ve made tutorials in the past with the game engine. In fact, I’d like to quote one of your tutorials:
Anyways, I haven’t been able to find a working OSX 10.5 build yet, so I’ve just decided to manually do all of the weight paining. It’s not too hard anyways, mostly because it’s an impressively low poly mesh (614 polys). I have to fix some of my leg constraints yet, but otherwise it’s looking good. Now I just gotta get him textured.
I’m working on unwrapping this guy so I can start the texture work, and I discovered that
Applying the Mirror modifier to the mesh will now retain Seams (never used to do that). This should make my unwrapping smooth and easy. :eyebrowlift:
Well, I decided that I was doing something wrong, especially for what I am designing. I’ll give you some insight to how this character will be used. I am designing a game that will utilize a First Person Shooter / 3rd Person style that will introduce some new gaming concepts that haven’t been seen in the Blender GE industry yet. I have some ideas I’m working on implementing that are inspired from other commercial games (i.e. Gears of War, Halo, etc.). So with the respective game style, I redesigned the character using the original as a base, and started making him look more game-like. Here’s an early WIP of the redesign:
I like the model, it looks great. Just one crit, didnt say anything before because I thought perhaps he was different, but now I can see where you are going.
I think his calves are too big. Unless he is a hulk type character? or he has some mighty heavy/big gear on his legs.
Here’s a little bit of an update on the character. Started hammering down on the weight painting and rigging, and thought I would show you some progress, in a bit of a different way then I’m used to . . . you’ll need quicktime 7 to view it:
