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Hihi.
Some of you have seen the female model I have been working on. Shes getting better as I go, just an arm, a foot and a head (gulp) left to do. Its getting to the point where I should really be thinking carfully about what needs to be prepared for the final version making her ready for game use - specifically with darkbasic related engines (dbp and the sdk). This will need to be thought of both from a programming and modeling perspective to acheive a balance of functionality that can actually be acheived.

For example I know from experiance that any bones I place in the model with milkshape appear in darkbasics limb list. I intend to make full use of this by placing bones at choice locations like her neck, chest, hand and head etc because my game (Shisaku) is an RPG and on the equipment screen it will display your character model and I figure it would be cool to zoom in on parts of her body you are adjusting the equipment for (neckless, armour, etc). Simulary such place holders are usful for positioning weapons and other doodads that arnt part of her model alone.

I think I got that aspect covered and thought through (although further pointers are happily accepted ) but i'm also wondering about things like hair. I intend to make a sort of model animation class for my game engine that can handle basic animations of certain things like hair flowing in windy places etc. With this in mind, how should I model it? Lots of flat planes which I texture and seperate into limbs for access in db? One big one which i just attempt to rotate? x.x

Anything else I should be thinking of? My previous experiances with 3d games are basically just a case of make a model, give it some animation or the other and position it in game. But this RPG has been my project for several months and I intend to work on it in my spare time over the next year or two so i'm really going to town with it. As i've never really done the full works with 3d programming before im unsure of what i should REALLY be aware of when designing models for my games.

On a related note - is it more effcient to have lots of seperate textures (materials) as seperate images and assign them to specific parts of the model or to unwrap the entire thing in uv unwrap and use one of those big, single, textures for the entire model? ie, lots of small images or one big one is what im deciding between.

Feel free to throw in anything else that you think i should know
thanks

For hair, a pretty good method that ive seen good results from is making a bunch of "cards", which are textured planes with an alpha map of a hair texture. You may need 2 or 3 different alpha maps to get a good effect with it. Basically it is what you already said, lots of planes which you would put bones in. And from what I gather it is more efficient to use one image than many small ones, although i could be wrong as I don't program anymore.
Hope that helped

Yah all comments are usful so thankyou Anyone else?

and heres another question. If i make my model and split her body up into boned parts (feet, torso, head, etc, the usual) and I implement an equipment changing thing where what you have equiped changes how your model looks my first idea for it would be have your naked model (with acceptable standard coverings of course >> and say someone equiped a pair of boots i would delete the limb ID for her feet and add a new limb using a model of a pair of boots. But if her skeleton was animated would deleting the limb just kill the polygons or the animation data for it to? Ie, would deleting her feet and adding a pair of boots cause a pair of boots to slide about whilst her legs waged about over them ever time she walked? XD

maybe you could have a boot object that covers her feet and then becomes part of the animation chain. but I dunno Im no good at animation just trying to help .

I have considered it - but this is quite important for when it comes to me actually modeling the foot (its ready to be done now) - if I model her some toes then its a complete waste of polygons unless they are actually showing. If it replaces the foot limb depending on what you got equiped then its fine to have toes for bare foot which just disapear when you put on boots. If i just cover her feet with another object though it will raise the polycount rather needlessly :/

-EDIT:

if i can find a way to replace bodyparts without loosing animation data then simply by modeling a few extra heads, accessories and using a little in-code scaling trickery i could make DOZENS of npcs characters made mainly from the same base model! it would cut down on TONS of modeling time and hell I could even set up a random system to populate villages with random people, all looking different, each time you start a new game! But i need to preserve the animation data ><;

I may be wrong, but there might be a "hide limb" command in db so you would attach the boot to the limb and then hide it. That way it isn't trying to display too many polygons. Not sure if that would lower polys in scene or not tho.

It shouldn't matter either way. IIRC, the main slowdown with poly's is drawing them, not calculating them.


It's been done before in the KotOR series, so it's possible. Maybe not in DB, but it's possible.

what you're looking to achieve is perfectly possible in DBC and DBP. but firstly you need to know a few things.

DBC can only manage limbed models, that is models where seperate objects linked together in a hierachy form your model such as a torso, waist, arm, forearm, hand etc

DBP however supports skinned meshes where you have one solid object, that is controlled by a "rig" of bones which create a skeleton.

when you create a bone in milkshape, it is treated as part of that rig. you then go and select vertices, and assign them to that bone. when you move the bone, the vertices will deform. (like you see in modern games)

now, the great thing about this is with both methods, you can actually do real time limb movements, allowing for ragdolls and all that jazz, altho with bone deformation, its a bit trickier to get working. refer to the tutorial stickied on this board for tips on that.


as for what you're doing, or want to do;

you're not going to be able to do things like change people's faces easily.

your best bet would be to do something like have a base character, that uses bone deformation, but with a very small head. then use the add limb commands and add the limb where the head bone is, you'll then need to link it to the head bone in the hierachy, making the new part the head bones child. You would however end up with a line under people's heads that shouldn't be there, but most people let that sort of thing slide. you could add clothes, paricularly armour, by adding new limbs in the same way.

you asked about textures. you need to make 1 texture, 512x512 or another square size, make sure its a power of 2 though, and you need to unwrap it.
you'll need to texture the new limbs as a seperate step, so each head will need it's own map. However if you want to have lots of different heads and such, i'd advise unwrapping 4 heads to the same map(one in each corner), in order to cut down on memory usage.

with this sort of system in place, you'd keep the base model's animation, while having its appearance changed. Its not a perfect system, but enless you want to try and stick models together at the byte level, its your best bet.

any questions?

Manic