Re: Sinbad's Model Thread

[asomath]

I love it! It will be a fantastic addition.

~Asomath

[Sinbad]

Fully Rigged now guys, just gotta animate it now.

Thinking of doing:
A ~60 frame loop for "standing still" animation
A ~30 frame loop for "walking/running" animation
A ~25 frame "attack" animation

And I will just put them all in the one .fbx file with a .txt file showing the final animation frame lengths.
I know this is the process for character animation in Unity, if Unreal works differently can someone please let me know how?

[schveider]

I'm afraid I can't help you much with this as I don't have any practical knowledge about skeletal animation and importing into UDK. However I'm pretty sure you can find everything you need in documentation http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXPipeline.html

[Sinbad]

Ok slightly different to the Unity animation pipeline but seems easy enough.
I just have to export a seperate file with just the skeleton for each animation I want to do.
Already finished the standing still animation so I could send that plus the finished model and textures through to your google docs if you like?
Just gotta finish running and attacking

EDIT:

Just realised I'll also need to do a "Taking damage" and "Death" animation also.

I'll be honest guys, actually animating these things is not really a strong point for me, so if someone else would like to have a try I could upload what I've made so far?

[Sinbad]

Hey Schveider, I uploaded a WIP of the whole thing minus any animation to your google source code site thing

[schveider]

Model looks very good. It would be nice if you could improve diffuse texture since although being 2048 it doesn't have much details and is little bit blurry.
It is not important you are not an animator. We need at least something which looks like movement and attacking for purpose of testing . How it looks doesn't matter in this phase.
And as regards tesselation I'm afraid we can't use it so far because there is still bug in UDK which causes model's topology to be disconnected in UV map's seams.

[Sinbad]

Sweet as, I'll work on improving the textures and creating some bad animations next week

[Sinbad]

Luckily one of my Ex-Students has picked up where i left off on the animation side of things.
So far he has created a walk/run and an attack animation

[schveider]

That's great! Glad to hear that

[Sinbad]

My ex - student seems to have given up on animations for now. I think he got most of them done so I'll try and get them off him.
I can't recall if I already uploaded the model? I think I did right? Just waiting on the animations now?
I'll post up whatever I can get off him asap.

[schveider]

Yes, you did. However for now the animations aren't so urgent since I don't have time right now to use them and it appears I won't have any in near future. Not until I finish my thesis .

[asomath]

Appears we've all been a bit busy

~Asomath

P.S. Anyone else see that Ribannah validated a member 3 weeks ago? I totally missed it until now.

[Sinbad]

Alrighty, well seeing as I've apparently finished the tripod, what's a good one for me to do next?
By the way, you guys can check out the full textured model here: p3d.in/fxyVq

[asomath]

Love it

What are you feeling up for... a Structure, Creature, Human NPC?

~Asomath

[Sinbad]

Creature please!
or NPC, either way - lets get everything done for serenity

[schveider]

Asomath notified me you wishes to make another creature. Unfortunately I replied to his message first so I copy here part of it.

I think Sinbad could make dragon as there should be one in Serenity. Despite it is quite complex model almost any concept art is necessary since dragons usually looks all the same. Decision whether the dragon should look more lizzard-like similar to M&M7 or more massive like in M&M6 is up to Sinbad.

Feel free to ask if you want me to clarify details.

[Sinbad]

I'm guessing the poly count will be quite a bit more than the tripod :p
What is the absolute maximum for a monster?

[schveider]

I'm guessing the poly count will be quite a bit more than the tripod :p

Well, yes, slightly Unfortunately I have no idea where the dragon will be placed, so it is hard to make any computations about overall polycount. Let's make assumption it would be some kind of ruins (with few or no vegetation) instead of cave to be more inovative . In this case it could be similar to temple i.e. ~50k poly however if really necessary then up to 70k but no more.
Despite I know very few details about this dragon I assume there is a dialog with him thus he should be fully animated. In case of humanoid characters it usually implies half of polygons for head and rest for body. I don't know if this "rule" holds also for non-humanoid NPCs but I expect there would be something similar.
As for modelling itself please make some generic dragon shape at first since there are more dragons either common or unique like the one in Serenity. From this model any others could be made if necessary (it also means you shouldn't make UV map for this generic shape).

What is the absolute maximum for a monster?

If you ask about some general rule I don't know about any and I don't think there is any since it depends on many factors. First thing you usually consider is quality of graphic you want to achieve. Then you need to think up where this character is going to be placed which means you need to consider other objects in your scene, quality of materials, quality of lighting and shadows plus another objects in your scene which can move - usually characters which also decreases performance only by their animation and increases complexity of predictions you need to do about scene's overall polycount.
Perhaps someone more qualified would give you more precise answer .

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