Mitten Hands

[Springheel]

This is continuing from a thread in the animation forum.

 

One clarification--When we say "mitten hands" we're talking about the D3 style of a separate index finger and thumb, with the other three fingers bound together (if that's not correct, someone let me know).

 

1. Are we going with mitten hands (I'm now in favour of it)? If so, who is going to make them? How hard is it to attach them? Does it mess up current animations?

Background: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...hl=mitten+hands

 

1. I'd prefer full fingered hands, although I think it should be dependant on the model. It would be nice being able to choose between depending on the character, for example in Half-life 2 the main characters of importance (Alyx, etc) are full fingered, while most of the enemies just use mitten ones. Are we going to be using the exact same rig for all the characters though? If so we'll have to decide on one or the other, personally I prefer full fingered hands becase it's beneficial for some characters (like the archer as mentioned in that thread, or for specific ations and cutscenes, if we decide to have some).

 

I know tds AI had 2 fingers and a thumb so that might be a nice compromise between full fingers and mittens. Also, if we decide to go with mitten hands, that'll cut down some options down the road.

 

1. This is a modelling issue. We should use mitten hands. There are no "characters of importance", since this is a generic toolset that doesn't contain plot characters. There will always be multiple clones of every character we model for this toolset.

[Springheel]

Now, IIRC, using mitten hands would save about 700 polys per model. Given that it's not uncommon to have three or four characters on screen at the same time (and sometimes many more), that starts to add up.

 

There was another option that was mentioned in one of the discussions, however, and that was modelling a lower poly full-fingered hand. BT said he could produce one that would save about 400 polys per model.

 

I think we certainly should replace the current hands, and I'm not sure either option is more awkward than the others when it comes to animations.

 

So far, all the comments have been about whether to go with mitten hands or not. But assuming that we're going to replace the current hands with *something* that is lower poly, what does that entail? Do the models have to be entirely rerigged? Is it something that should be done now, before new animations are made?

[Domarius]

Whatever happens, the anims have to be re-exported. This is a mundane thing, no anims have to actually be changed.

 

The current rig is set up with 2 fingers and a thumb (or is it three fingers? Can't check, I'm at work). So switching to mitten hands wouldn't change that.

 

Currently, with the fully modelled hands, the last 3 fingers bend with each other.

 

If you changed the rig to animate each finger, then the number of bones would change and then there would be a lot more stuffing around mapping the animations from the old rig to the new rig. I'm not certain what that involves exactly.

[Solis]

700 polygons seems like a lot to go from full fingered to mitten hands...it SHOULDN'T add more than a hundred polygons or so to insert 2 slots for fingers in each hand. Actually, if we want to go the super-low-poly route, here's a really basic full fingered hand I made a long time ago for another project:

 

 

 

It weighs in at 188 triangles, and isn't very optimised since it was converted straight from quads to tris. A mitten hand version would be around 140 polygons. Would something like this work on our current characters?

[Springheel]

It might with a decent normal map, I don't know.

 

Hopefully when BT gets back up to speed from his vacation he can give us some more info about the lowpoly ones he did.

[Domarius]

Heh, it looks like an N64 model. I would like to see how it turns out with normal mapping, viewed from a reasonable distance back.

[Solis]

Well it certainly won't win any beauty contests close up, but it's light on polygons. It was actually designed to be subdivided into a higher polygon hand, so it's at the bare minimum like that. It was eventually turned into this:

 

 

But at 752 triangles that's probably way too high to use on our current models as it is since it's most likely pretty far above our polygon budget (did anyone come up with a set limit for that?). I'm not sure how high our current hand models are (presumably pretty high if we can shave 350 polygons from each hand if we use mitten hands), but whether we want to use oDDities mitten hands or BT's reformed hands or an optimised version of one of these, we should probably see what they each will look like and how polygon efficient they are and then decide on which works best.

 

On that note, does anyone have a standard, model only character (before the normal maps, textures, etc.), preferably in Lightwave .lwo format if possible, that I can take a look at and see how the hands look attached to them? I'd like to take a look at what the basic model geometry is like so that I can get a clearer picture of what the hands we're going to use will look like on them (generally if something looks out of place on the flat shaded model, it will still look out of place even with a nice normal map on it).

[Springheel]

There is a male and female model on the FTP that we're using as a base for all the models, but I can't think of the name offhand. Not quite sure if that's what you're looking for.

[Domarius]

On that note, does anyone have a standard, model only character (before the normal maps, textures, etc.), preferably in Lightwave .lwo format if possible, that I can take a look at and see how the hands look attached to them? I'd like to take a look at what the basic model geometry is like so that I can get a clearer picture of what the hands we're going to use will look like on them (generally if something looks out of place on the flat shaded model, it will still look out of place even with a nice normal map on it).

All our models are model only - if you don't load the textures and normal maps.

 

The character template files (in .lwo format) are under /TheDarkMod/models/CharacterTemplates