After about four months of work, starting from a lowly cylinder, my model is finally in a state where all that’s left is tweaking, smoothing, and the weird and wonderful world of texturing.
As a reference, here’s what I’m going for:
And here’s what I’ve ended up with:
The neat thing for me is that this is the first model I’ve modelled almost entirely in quads…ever. :eyebrowlift: The only triangles that exist are the tips of Renamon’s claws, ears, and the flap things sticking behind her head.
The “wings” on Renamon’s shoulders are separate from the main mesh since I want to animate the her and didn’t want the wings to deformed when the shoulder moves. Similarly, her mane is also a separate mesh.
This model has 2224 faces (3980 triangles). I was wanting to smooth Renamon out with a subsurf modifier, which would add some required edge loops, like around the wrists. That would bump the face count up to 8728 (16256 triangles) though. This would be over the limit on the number of polygons I was going for (about 10000 triangles). I suppose after the subsurfing I could just remove some extraneous loops and polygons.
It’s a good start and a nice model but something felt strange. Had to compare with my model to figure it out what: it’s very thin. If you compare with the reference image the creator of this character exaggerated the circumference of the character a lot so the waist is very thing but the leg shin area very large. It goes so far that the upper leg has the same circumference as the waist has. Since right now the character is a bit “kopflastig” ( meaning the upper part seems in general thicker than the lower part ).
Now what goes for animation there is no need to separate the meshes. I did a bunch of animations on such a character with wing flaps and fur wield to the base mesh and it deforms well. But in the end you can do this as you want. Both ways work out depending on what you want to use the animations for.
About the model appearing too thin and top-heavy (or “kopflastig”): I’ve probably mentioned this before, but part of the reason is that I intend to make my model into a character useable in a game mod. So, I’ve been trying to match my model up to the skeleton of one of the game’s existing characters so I won’t have to create a whole new skeleton or a whole new set of animations. This has caused some distorting compared to the reference image; e.g. I think the shoulders are farther apart than in the reference.
As for the separate meshes, I’ve been thinking mainly about the shoulder since that’s the one limb that has the greatest degree of motion (and is probably the hardest to envelope). Here’s some close-ups of my shoulder:
I want the wings to maintain their shape as the shoulder moves, while I expect the shoulder edge loops to twist and squash together quite a bit as the arm moves, so I thought it’d be safer to keep the wing mesh separate. It also means I don’t have to worry about additional connection polygons (though there might be some texture seams).
Two things. First stay away from envelops when doing game models. They are ill-suited for this purpose since game models have very few bones. Use bone weight painting to get good deforms. Now concerning the model I would make a new one and not using a player model unless this model is already a bent-leg character. Rena has rather long legs, a relatively short torso and ill-positioned knee caps so this could be a pain to get it working right. That said I don’t know which game you make this for so it might be a bigger problem to make a new actor rig.
That’s what I meant to say. I got my terminology wrong. I guess it’s worth asking what an envelope is exactly.
Now concerning the model I would make a new one and not using a player model…I don’t know which game you make this for so it might be a bigger problem to make a new actor rig.
Specifically, the game is Half-Life 2 and derivatives (e.g. Garry’s Mod). Its characters/players have practically a hundred animations which I don’t want to bother making a whole new skeleton for. That said, handling the model’s ankle (the backwards knee) will be difficult, but I expect it to be doable since I’ve done it before.
Also, I’ve thickened the legs a bit. I might need to tweak the positioning of the feet, but hopefully this will make Renamon seem less "“kopflastig.”
Using envelops blender calculates how much weight a vertex gets from each bone judging by the distance of the vertex to the bone segment. So the envelop around the bone ( the radius from tail to head ) is the are of influence. Obviously this is a rather crude way of attaching vertices to bones but very fast since you don’t need to paint things but lacks the fine grained control of bone weighting.
I see, so you want to replace the Alex character. Seen that character video too before. You can find various screen shots on DA too. Could have done this replacement too but I didn’t release the model to avoid legal troubles.
I actually intend to do my weight painting in XSI Mod Tool, since that has the exporter and standard human skeleton for the Source engine (what Half-Life 2 runs on). Blender is for modelling and texturing.
As for enveloping (after you reminding me what it is) I’ve found that I start by enveloping the mesh to the skeleton, then doing weight painting to fine-tune the deformation. This is in XSI mind you; I haven’t done any rigging in Blender.
The model in the video wasn’t originally made by myself; what I did was redo her texture, rig her to a skeleton, and port her into the game. While rigging I noticed that her proportions didn’t exactly match the default skeleton, later motivating this original model.
Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and put a subsurf on Renamon. After I apply the modifiers I’ll have to tweak a few more vertices, and also merge some vertices and edge loops to keep my polygon count down. I’d appreciate any suggestions in the meantime.
P.S. Odjin, when you said “legal troubles”, would these be troubles that might affect me? :eek:
Blender can export to HL2. I know since I wrote one of the two exporters doing so ( mine can export skeletons including animations while the other works mostly with static props as far as I know but supports also importing ). Personally I would directly bone weight in Blender and then export. You can first import the Alex character and then bone weight it there.
What goes for the legal part I think you should be safe if it is only a character replacement ( a game addon to speak in ModDB terms ) and not a game modification or a game itself.
Just an update. I’ve smoothed Renamon out (subsurf) then deleted as many edge loops as I could. I was finally able to get within my polygon budget, and the model now has a total of 5202 polygons (10232 triangles).
