WIP Masters Question Ideas/research Character development and rigg creation

[Gephoria]

sounds doable in 3ds max 7+ (my experience) but the tricky part is the weightmaps, what you may like to try doing is make that char model, skin it to the rig then copy it over a couple times, re-design those others so that they look slightly different or bigger/smaller whatever you may prefer. I personally recommend skin but i don't have any info on the game engine you may be using, some require you use physique instead of skin on a model for weights/animation prep.

If I were you I would also (assuming you or one of your friends is an avid gamer and experienced the online sensation) install World of Warcraft Model View(WOWMV) on my computer and analyze the way blizzard acheived such results with their in game characters, they may be really low poly but at the sametime they're ranging in size and shape yet most use a very similar bone structure. Did I mention you can see the bones (not nessecarily the weights though) I have exported models fromthis 2 3d apps but animation data does not carry over or i just have not gotten that to work. Although i recommend WoWMV for any animator to at least look at or play with (it can be cool learning tool).

I'm not an expert animator but i know my way around max enough and taken enough classes to know the curve editor and how it can function. Basically put, get your character, skin it to bones, copy it over (if you'dlike throw an animation on it) and move the verts to your next char being it's the same mesh same weights as long as you don't add geometry you should be fine.

I hope this helps you in your quest brave warrior

[SkullRazer]

hehe thanks for the fast response ;)

i will take all those notes into consideration, i do actually own WOW (like the other millions of people haha but i haven’t played in a while) but i'll check that out it sounds interesting.



but i've made a few changes to my question that i will be asking/answering now!



after speaking with a few of my uni friends and tutors to do the first idea that I had explained above would be hard to achieve, producing a rigg that could move onto another mesh with the same weight system. But I we were talking about unless it was the same model shape and vert spaces it would be hard to achieve such a rigg unless i went into mel scripting which i don’t know how to start using as of yet, so i wouldn’t know were to really start on such things!



so my initial idea has changed to make 3 completely separate models now. one lowpoly, one current gen poly and one high poly (maybe for future gaming consoles/PC's)



this will hopefully show my versatility on character development and how each model is efficient in its own poly class.



my main focus on these have now changed from the rigg to the textures size and quality control to show a great understanding of texture/normal uses on each model that i use using different map sizes for each model too e.g.256-512, 1024-2048 and higher

so the main thing I am wanting to achieve is to relay realism within these models using the textures.



i decided it will be easier to rigg the characters separately using the same type of rigg but i will be weighting them differently depending on the size/shape of the character



i will be making a final choice on exactly what i will be focusing at the end of this week when i will be continuing this subject into more detail!



Thanks for your comments and if anyone else has any suggestions or comments plz post on here



Thanks for your time

Adam