LowPoly Rigging - Mesh Setup

[kandyman]

With rigid binding (1 vertex -> 1 bone), you will have areas where the deformation will suck, there's no way around it. All you can do is tweak until the most used poses work ok.

marin

[Milho]

That's what I was afraid of :hmm:
So i'll have to tweak the mesh / skeleton. what really sucks about it is that skeletons for Half-Life must be identical for every model (in multiplayer mods).
So the models must have rather similar meshes. Not much room for creativity :annoyed:

Let's see how I can handle it ;)

[thomaspecht]

you will have to tweak the mesh itself alot in the joint areas. that shoulder would break even if the polycount was higher.
i find it a good idea to not use a reference pose with straight arms (and legs, too) like you did but instead model the extremities in a bent pose and according to the underlying muscle structure. this way it's far easier to save vertices and ensure good deformation.
just check for paul steed's tutorials on this matter on looneygames - should be easy to find via google.

[Milho]

This helped a lot thx. I found a nice page with links to some nice lowpoly tutorials, also the paul steed stuff is included:

http://www.cschell.com/tutoriallist.html

I think this will help me.

What do you think of making the extremities separate like this model http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.28/totb/

In "this" LowPoly this should work fine, especially in this tricky areas like the shoulder. I can remember that the origial HalfLife Model of Gordan hat separate arms.
I will try and see how it looks like.

[suck]

it's really not that hard to get a pretty good deformation in the shoulder with that type of rigid skinning.

what you need to do is think of the shoulder like a wedge.
so the right shoulder of a character facing you will look basically like this:

arm \| torso

if that makes any sense :)

so when it's bent it looks like this

_| torso
a
r
m

so the idea is to basically build the cross sections of the shoulder at an angle so that when you bend the arm down 90deg it maintains its volume. i suggest practicing on a modified 6 sided cylinder with just a couple bones. this same concept holds true for the hips, elbows, and knees.

-ben

[Milho]

The problem why this concept harldy works is that you don't have to bend the arm only in thís direction, up and down but also forward and backwards. and ich you straight the arm above the head theres also a conlict because \| stays inside the arm ;)

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