Male And Female Templates To Come From Squawks This Weekend

[sparhawk]

The guy looks really good. The femal is hard to say as it's pretty small, but the head definitely looks great to me.

[Domarius]

Cool

[Springheel]

I don't know what stage of completion these are at, but a couple of suggestions:

 

Male:

 

The male figure is quite thin below the waist compared to his upper body proportions. His legs and feet will look especially thin when perspective is in effect, especially because Odd compensated for that with fairly large boots. Making the boots larger would help him fit in with the other models.

 

The head looks great in that rendered shot.

 

It would be nice if the sleeve went further down the arm.

 

 

Female:

 

I like the hooded head--that's a keeper.

 

The proportions on a number of the women seem off, however. The necks on most of the models are too long, and her waist is quite low (the hands should rest somewhere between the hips and the knees, not right at crotch level).

[Domarius]

I thought we had mixed opinions about the big boot thing, last I remember. What do you do if someone has bare feet, give them big feet? Surely that would look bad.

 

Though I agree he's generally thin below the waist. And the general comments about the women. And the sleeve length is a trivial change.

 

She's already done the heavy work, so no need to bother her with the trivialities - I can quickly make those tweaks after I get the models. That's certainly within my level of artistic and technical ability, and won't take long.

[Springheel]

I thought we had mixed opinions about the big boot thing, last I remember.

 

That was long, long ago, and I believe Odd did shrink them a bit since that discussion.

 

Regardless, that's the style we have with the existing models, and we need to try and stay consistant. I'm not totally happy with the way the nobleman or houseguard look when you put them next to one of Odd's models...the difference in style and skill level is more obvious than I'd like.

[Domarius]

No disagreements here.

[ascottk]

I hate to bring this up. Most our AI are in a T-Pose. Rigging is a little more difficult (I'm not sure if we can retain compatibility between skeletons) when they are not in that pose. I'll experiment with the builder priest, since he's not in a T-Pose either, to see if rigging can be done & maintain compatibility when they're not in a T-Pose. It'll be a while to see the results of that because he requires a lot of work

[ascottk]

He's not coming together very well Not having a model in a T-Pose has its complications.

 

 

I'll do more experimenting & research (I used the builder guard's skeleton). Also I'm not using the right material for the head.

[sparhawk]

LOL That one looks pretty, erm ... uhm, surrealistic.

[New Horizon]

Is there any way to get him into a T pose? Perhaps odd has a t pose for him somewhere?

[SneaksieDave]

[ascottk]

Is there any way to get him into a T pose? Perhaps odd has a t pose for him somewhere?

I could vertex edit the hell out of him to get him in the T-Pose. I'll read up on some ways to freeze the mesh in the T-Pose position if it can be done. I rigged him in the stance position then moved the arm joints into the T position afterwards. If I delete the skeleton then the mesh will bounce back to the stance position. If I try to freeze the position in Maya then it'll complain that the mesh is locked. I wonder if there's a way to bypass that

 

I might use the citywatch skeleton next time because I found some weird joint positions in the builder guard.

[sparhawk]

Can you import it to Blender? In Blender you can freeze the mesh in any position you like IMO. But then, I would be surprised, if that would not be possible in other apps as well. Seems to be a rather important function to me.

[ascottk]

Can you import it to Blender? In Blender you can freeze the mesh in any position you like IMO. But then, I would be surprised, if that would not be possible in other apps as well. Seems to be a rather important function to me.

I feel more comfortable in max. I'll experiment over the weekend.

[oDDity]

I could easily put him in a t-pose, but there are going to be serious complications because of the cloth cape - I knew from first seeing the concept that this would be a nightmare for animation, but at the time we were still vaguely hoping for cloth animation via vertices exporting.

This is still technically an option, there is an md5 vertex exporter for maya, and the cape can actually be animated post run-cycle via cloth, with maya or syflex, but we've never really worked out what the performance hit is of turning all those vertices into bones, and also it would have to be made a more desnse mesh.

The priest is just one of the models that is going to need a lot of custom, unique setup and animaiton, or else the mesh will have to be changed.

[ascottk]

I could easily put him in a t-pose, but there are going to be serious complications because of the cloth cape - I knew from first seeing the concept that this would be a nightmare for animation, but at the time we were still vaguely hoping for cloth animation via vertices exporting.

This is still technically an option, there is an md5 vertex exporter for maya, and the cape can actually be animated post run-cycle via cloth, with maya or syflex, but we've never really worked out what the performance hit is of turning all those vertices into bones, and also it would have to be made a more desnse mesh.

The priest is just one of the models that is going to need a lot of custom, unique setup and animaiton, or else the mesh will have to be changed.

I think it'll work with one of the tdm "standard" skeletons. I'm learning a lot with this guy. I just need to find the right way to weight the vertices after he gets into a proper T-Pose. One way of approaching this is to start rigging in the T-Pose then adjust the weighting after rotating the joints. The cape is partially weighted to Spine2 while the majority is weighted to the upper arms. With the right amount of weighting, the cape won't totally raise with the arms so it looks like the cape is resting, not floating, above the arms when they're raised. The same applies to the lower robe since we're adding legs to him. This was semi-successful with the noble woman. The legs barely clip through the dress. I might need to add a few faces to his robe so the middle crease doesn't favor one leg to another. Right now, one leg will clip when one or the other raises.

 

Ideally it might look like: /\ instead of /|\ . With the last layout, the middle part will favor one leg & it'll clip.

 

I just need to make sure the joint rotations don't get messed up while putting him in different poses while rigging.

[oDDity]

Yes, but you're going to have to restrict the arm movement a lot for his animations, there's no way he can do the same wide range of actions as other characters with that cape draped over his arms. It'll stretch the textures too much and look like shit.

It would be easier just to remove the cape, the concept of the character really doesn't look too much different without it.

[ascottk]

Yes, but you're going to have to restrict the arm movement a lot for his animations, there's no way he can do the same wide range of actions as other characters with that cape draped over his arms. It'll stretch the textures too much and look like shit.

It would be easier just to remove the cape, the concept of the character really doesn't look too much different without it.

The stretching doesn't look bad at all:

Removing the cape reveals a nice little hole in the mesh & I think he looks like crap without it.

[Springheel]

Looks ok to me.

[Domarius]

I can put squawk's characters into the T-Pose too.

[Domarius]

That was long, long ago, and I believe Odd did shrink them a bit since that discussion.

Though I still want to know - what if a character has bare feet? Do they have feet that are proportionately correct relative to the rest of them, or do they compensate for perspective by having huge feet?

[Springheel]

I don't think it likely that we'd have characters with bare feet, but I'm not sure what the answer to that would be. I do know that perspective does make the house-guard and noble-man's feet look a little too small, even though they're ok when you see them without perspective.

[Domarius]

I think we might be lucky by most characters having boots. Most females have a gown too.

 

But for the females without gowns, I think it might look strange to enlarge their feet if they are not wearing boots. Like slippers or something.

[Springheel]

I'm not disagreeing with you. Maybe Oddity can speak to that.

[Domarius]

squawks said you should be able to tweak the models to whatever suits.

 

I asked her about the long neck, and she said that its at maximum length so you can shorten it to suit whatever clothing. I'll make it average length, so it starts out "normal".

 

She said her hands reach her crotch level, although me looking at the pics again, I can see the wrists would end up at crotch level anyway, like my own hands. Are you sure they're too low? I know womens hips are higher than mens, on average, maybe they could be a touch higher, I suppose.