Variable Body shape & character clothing
by Sparkling · in Artist Corner · 02/25/2006 (11:08 am) · 2 replies
Hello,
I'm going to venture a question here, in hopes of obtaining suggestions for viable solutions, and realistic options. Please only post if you can offer something positive to the conversation that will be helpful to my team, and to the many others who may come after us wishing to find similar information to help in their projects also.
We are in the begining stages of development, and are still developing our character models. We have discussed various options, but have not decided on a particular method yet. It is my hope that with input from the community that we might be able to find a better solution than the limited information we have come up with so far. I would like to be able to get our character selection process correct from the onset, rather than having to re-do it several times before we get it like I want it. SO I thought it would be helpful to start this conversation sooner rather than later.
GOAL:
I want players to be able to have a high degree of customization of their avatars in the character creation process. I want them to be able to choose if they want to look tall, or short, fat or thin, muscular or lean, young or aged, hair color and type (like straight or curly), and of course male or female. Not just to choose different faces to paste onto an otherwise identical bodyshape, but to be able to choose and vary the boy shape as well.
In addition to this I want players to be able to choose a variety of hair styles. And unlike the body shape (which should be final once they enter the game world), the hair style should be something they are allowed to change once a day. Like to be able to have their hair down one day, and wear it in a pony tail the next day. It should feel like the player has a high degree of personal expression in their avatar.
I know this CAN be done because I have seen it done in other games: Myst (or maybe it was Uru... I can't remember now), EQ2 to some degree (though you can't make your avatar fat only short or tall), COH to some degree, and Second Life (does this very very well!!). I just don't know HOW they do it. I would like to learn, or at least like the information so that my team can learn. :D
ISSUES:
Well the first, and most obvious issue is developing the tool which will allow players to easily morph their avatar, and creating an intuitive interface that will be user friendly. Suggestions on how to create a character creation tool that will make it easy for players to morph their avatar would be welcomed. So far in my research (which certainly has not been exhaustive, there must be something out there, I just haven't fonud it yet) I have not seen any suggestions in how to accomplish this. As I've seen in other games, it CAN be done, but no one seems to be talking about HOW it is done.
To do this the way I think it should work, we would really only need 1 male and 1 female base model, and then the player could modify it using the tool to their own specifications to create an infinte number of variations.
To do this the way people have been telling me we have to do it, we will have to create all the variations of the character model seperately, and the player will then choose from among the limited selections. Obviously, this involves immensely more work from the artists, and is not my favorite option.
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I'm going to venture a question here, in hopes of obtaining suggestions for viable solutions, and realistic options. Please only post if you can offer something positive to the conversation that will be helpful to my team, and to the many others who may come after us wishing to find similar information to help in their projects also.
We are in the begining stages of development, and are still developing our character models. We have discussed various options, but have not decided on a particular method yet. It is my hope that with input from the community that we might be able to find a better solution than the limited information we have come up with so far. I would like to be able to get our character selection process correct from the onset, rather than having to re-do it several times before we get it like I want it. SO I thought it would be helpful to start this conversation sooner rather than later.
GOAL:
I want players to be able to have a high degree of customization of their avatars in the character creation process. I want them to be able to choose if they want to look tall, or short, fat or thin, muscular or lean, young or aged, hair color and type (like straight or curly), and of course male or female. Not just to choose different faces to paste onto an otherwise identical bodyshape, but to be able to choose and vary the boy shape as well.
In addition to this I want players to be able to choose a variety of hair styles. And unlike the body shape (which should be final once they enter the game world), the hair style should be something they are allowed to change once a day. Like to be able to have their hair down one day, and wear it in a pony tail the next day. It should feel like the player has a high degree of personal expression in their avatar.
I know this CAN be done because I have seen it done in other games: Myst (or maybe it was Uru... I can't remember now), EQ2 to some degree (though you can't make your avatar fat only short or tall), COH to some degree, and Second Life (does this very very well!!). I just don't know HOW they do it. I would like to learn, or at least like the information so that my team can learn. :D
ISSUES:
Well the first, and most obvious issue is developing the tool which will allow players to easily morph their avatar, and creating an intuitive interface that will be user friendly. Suggestions on how to create a character creation tool that will make it easy for players to morph their avatar would be welcomed. So far in my research (which certainly has not been exhaustive, there must be something out there, I just haven't fonud it yet) I have not seen any suggestions in how to accomplish this. As I've seen in other games, it CAN be done, but no one seems to be talking about HOW it is done.
To do this the way I think it should work, we would really only need 1 male and 1 female base model, and then the player could modify it using the tool to their own specifications to create an infinte number of variations.
To do this the way people have been telling me we have to do it, we will have to create all the variations of the character model seperately, and the player will then choose from among the limited selections. Obviously, this involves immensely more work from the artists, and is not my favorite option.
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About the author
Laurene Wells is the owner of Heaven's Blessings Tiny Zoo (HBTZ). She is Producer of Chariots (2008) and Visions (in production), leading a team of volunteers who collaborate online from around the world. Learn more about the company at http://tinyzoo.com
#2
Just one thing though, wouldn't the server have to transmit the proportions of every single character that the client comes across? Granted you could do that just once for each character, and send the tag after that, it seems like you might want to limit what proportions could be worked so that the server doesn't get bogged. The image of a new character wandering into a bustling town (those are bad enough without different proportions) his client would get swamped with info.
In any instance I wish you luck with your endeavour, and I hope you get some better answers than mine :)
02/27/2006 (8:33 am)
The first issue sounds like you would need something like this resource. as for your second issue, I'm not sure how the mounting points would work, a simple test would be to create one armor piece, and two models of very different proportions and find out, although that resource mihgt have taken care of that particular problem.Just one thing though, wouldn't the server have to transmit the proportions of every single character that the client comes across? Granted you could do that just once for each character, and send the tag after that, it seems like you might want to limit what proportions could be worked so that the server doesn't get bogged. The image of a new character wandering into a bustling town (those are bad enough without different proportions) his client would get swamped with info.
In any instance I wish you luck with your endeavour, and I hope you get some better answers than mine :)
Torque 3D Owner Sparkling
The second obvious, and very significant issue is clothing or armor. The method of clothing an avatar most often reccomended that I have seen is to first create the avatar, and then draw armor to fit it. For every variation of the avatar that exists, there will have to be a new set of clothing drawn for that avatar to match it. This strongly discourages us from going with the Highly Customized avatar, because we would have to draw an infinite number of armor pieces for the infinite number of size and shape combinations possible. That's just NOT going to happen. My team is not that big. There must be a better way?
I saw a discussion once of using anchor points, or mounting points, on the avatar to match up with identical anchor points on the clothing, for animation purposes. But in reading through that discussion, I didn't see any indication that this was being used for variability of body shape. Would it work? Would mounting points on the armor morph it properly to match the variation in body shape?
DETAILS:
- Yes, we are using TGE to create our game.
- We have plans to upgrade to TSE (and thus port over the work we have accomplished thus far) in the near future, probably this summer. TSE will allow us to do Normal Mapping, expand our terrain, and provides a lot of modifications we would have had to do to TGE to begin with anyway, so it's the logical solution to our development issues.
- We are currently only developing for Windows PC based platform.
- This will be a MMORPG so low polycount is critical for our models.
- We do not have funding, so all work is being done by a very small team of volunteers. We do not have the resources of a large production company.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions and encoruagement.
Blessings to you,
-Sparkling
http://www.visionsgame.com