Studio B Game Development
Home Screenshots Blog About Us Contact	April - June 2006 - Main character, bone rigging, and our first simple animation
		April strolls along and our main character finally comes into existence! A LOT of time was saved by using a do-it-yourself mesh producer program called MakeHuman. I originally wanted to make the whole body from scratch for my own personal experience but, it would've taken eons to create with the limbs, fingers, ears, detailed facial features, etc. And to perfect them to my nazi-perfectionist style of satisfication wouldn'tve helped speed up the process either. So, we opted for this handy little program instead. Making our main character was the most tedious, time-consuming 3D modeling I've come across. We found that 5,000 verticies is a good number to aim for for the whole body, catering to the face more. The MakeHuman mesh gave me WAY too many verticies and well... he basically looked like a woman. I ended upgetting him to be around 4,000 verticies from originally 9,000! At this point, I contemplated if I should've created him from scratch instead, but alas, he was starting to look like a man. Now that he's modeled, he needs a texture. Textures are 2D images wrapped around a 3D object. In order to fit the flat image around the object without any weird seems or stretching, the object needs to be mapped out on a flat surface. Here, you can see the mesh lines mapped where I painted in color which will be remapped back on the model. Now he's ready to be rigged with bones! While our character was going through his sex change, Patrick's focus was on animation, structural bones, and weight painting. We tested rigging a simple cylinder with a chain of two bones. Rigging is the process of giving an object, or a character segments called "bones" so it can move. Weight painting was needed to make the verticies around the joints less distorted when rotated. Along with some animation we took that concept, and with some trial and error, we witnessed our first simple animation - a swinging leg! Oh it was so exciting. Hardy any stretching or distortion, it was looking really good. Yes indeed. Back
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