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Step 2: Create This step consists of the following three sections: Model, Skeletonise and Test your Production Pipeline Model: Now that you've got piles of delectable, director-approved photos and/or drawings of your character in action, its time to start modeling. In my opinion the animator should model the characters. That way, when problems crop up later, it's clear who should do the fixing. If the schedule doesn't permit this, have the modeler and the animator meet regularly. A good-looking model isn't necessarily an animatable one. Character modeling is a critical step in the animation process, but it's also a very complex issue. I've read several good articles recently, especially Josh White's article, "Birthing Low-Polygon Characters", in the November '97 issue of Game Developer. The best general advice I can give is this; view your model inside your game environment as soon as you possibly can. I can't tell you how many times I've seen scale, texture, polygon count and design issues come up very late in the production process and stress the whole team out. Viewing the model in the game as soon and as often as possible can help prevent those situations. Skeletonise: Now its time to add a skeleton to your beautiful character model. This task is generally best left to animators, because they'll be using the skeleton once it's complete. Since they built it, they'll be eager to help with any problems that will crop up later. Adding a skeleton is a very tricky process and can only be properly learned through experience. Problems can arise with software skeleton building techniques, legacy design, modeling techniques, poor communication, or incorrect implementation in software - among many other areas. I would like to emphasize two things about adding a skeleton: don't start adding the skeleton until the model is approved by the director in the game, and be sure that there are absolutely no discrepancies between the animator's skeleton and the one the programmer is using in the game. This second point gets me all the time! Whether its because joints shift position when you attach IK components or the artists round off joint positional values differently than the programmers, every bit of meticulousness you can muster must be applied in this step. There was a recent article in Game Developer that covered some of the most important artistic issues very nicely. It was in the October '98 issue, written by Stephan Henry-Biskup, and called "Anatomically Correct Character Modeling". I keep a copy of this article close at hand whenever I do this sort of work. Test Your Production Pipeline: Ok, you're model is textured and scaled properly. It has a skeleton, and the game designer has seen it in the game and has approved everything. Now its time to start testing your production pipeline. Hopefully, while the animator was modeling the creature, he was also designing the production pipeline with the animation programmer. Keep the design of the production pipeline very simple. If you're not careful, it'll quickly get more complicated than you can believe. Some of the issues you'll face in designing your production flow are whether to use motion capture or key-framing, directory structures, file naming conventions and converting data-intensive animation files into economized game-ready motion data, but believe me, there'll be plenty of others. _____________________________________________________ |
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Features
