BGP – 2
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This time I’m going to talk a little about our characters for the game. In the game we are planning to have five people that are missing, a bunch of rescue workers and citizens that roam around the streets. We have been working on the survivors since they happen to be the most crucial characters in the game. Before the start of the course we had a conversation with our 3D teacher and she suggested that we used a program called MakeHuman. Our game is very asset-heavy and there is a lot to do so it would be wise to ’cheat’ a little with the characters. Especially because they are not our main focus, our main focus is the overall feeling, the characters are just there to convey the story.
MakeHuman is a very useful program for creating characters. Basically it works like Sims, you can either randomize the height, the looks and the weight or you can modify them as you like. As you can see from the image above, there is a possibility to get the characters pre-rigged which saves a lot of time! There are few problems within the program though. There are very limited amount of different clothing, meaning that all of our characters will most likely have same shirt and same pants, only difference is the texturing. Other problem is that the low-poly is indeed very low and the high-poly might be too heavy for the game. But for me, the clothing is what bothers me the most. On a (late) side note there is this nice tool in Maya called ’reduce’, that could have helped! Since the clothing is very simple and I don’t want the people to wear such plain T-shirt and pants combination, I tried to do some changes to the clothing after importing it to Maya. This led to a lot of problems. Biggest problem of them all was in the end my fault, because I was a little bit unpleased with the UV and it bothered me that everything was on a separate map. I decided to combine the mesh into one whole mesh and after that I wanted to reduce the UV ’cakes’ from existing six to three. After doing all this, the rig didn’t work in MotionBuilder and I had to redo everything. But now, after all this mess, the character animations work and I finally got to texture two survivors!
The clothing in MakeHuman was only a plane, meaning that I could play a little bit with the opacity in Substance Painter and shorten the sleeves and add some wear and tear to the clothes!
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