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The Artist Synapse Back to Intro |
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Example Artist Interaction: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 |
| Degrees of Separation [View] |
| Psychology [View] |
| Suggestions [View] |
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Features vs. Beauty [View] |
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Artist: What kind of animation
will this model be able to use? Producer: 3D morphing with support for bones. |
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| Tech: The most common types of real-time animation include hierarchy, animated bitmaps, 3D morphing, or "none at all." This question will probably elicit a lot of detailed discussion on how to build the animation. Once the animation type has been settled, it's a good idea to build a simple test case and make sur.e it works. | Psych: In our example, we're getting a pretty sophisticated real-time animation system. That probably explains the low face budget - fancy animation methods usually hurt performance. It might be a good idea to verify this theory with the programmer. |
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Artist: How do I get animation
data into the engine? Producer: 3DS morph animation data is directly supported, so simply save the morphing animation sequence with the file name of the action - STALK.3DS, POUNCE.3DS, and so on. |
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| Tech: This critical question tells the artist exactly how to import animation data - it's usually much harder than importing the geometry and textures. For example, sometimes the artist must supply a string of 3D models as keyframes (STALK01.3DS, STALK02.3DS, and STALK03.3DS), or keyframes can be imported directly out of the 3D Studio animation data, as our answer indicates. The answer is usually followed a torrent of questions about how to handle animation data. For instance, what kinds of bone motions are possible - keyframes or every frame? Branching? Transitions? This issue requires a separate article to explain, but it's very important. | |
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Artist: Will any moving objects
always be moving? Producer: Yes. |
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| Tech: For objects that have moving parts, such as spinning wheels on a car or propellers on an airplane, we need to know if the spinning object will ever be seen still, which would require a second model (blurred and still). | |
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Artist: How many colors is
the target platform capable of showing? Producer: We're using 16-bit color. |
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| Tech: The usual answers are 8-bit (paletted), 16-bit (high-color) or 24-bit (true-color). This issue may be somewhat more confusing if the game is going to be used on multiple platforms. | |
