Character Rigging
by Bryan Morgan · in Artist Corner · 08/17/2009 (12:24 pm) · 0 replies
I guess this is both some questions about character rigging in general, and it's use in the Torque engines.
First off, how much processing does a rigged character require for the typical game polycount? Would it be unreasonably high if I wanted to rig a character so that the skin realistically moves with the animation by having a large feathered area of weights for most if not all the bones? Also what affect does the number of bones really have on processing(ie. Are computers typically fast enough now to do realistic finger and toe rigging without causing an issue?)? Is there a specific bone heirarchy that has to be used for the Torque engines, or will additional bones work as long as the ones defined in the kork and various other character models exist?
I've never rigged a character for a game, and so far I still havn't figured out how to export an armature from Blender so that it functions in Torque3D when using the COLLADA format, so any advice would be much appreciated. At the very least I would like to use IK for character/eye-tracking, but as that's not a feature of the characters currently in use with the Torque engines, I bet that would require a modification of how the engine uses the meshes. Even if that's the case I can probably do the changes if someone points me to the right area of the engine.
First off, how much processing does a rigged character require for the typical game polycount? Would it be unreasonably high if I wanted to rig a character so that the skin realistically moves with the animation by having a large feathered area of weights for most if not all the bones? Also what affect does the number of bones really have on processing(ie. Are computers typically fast enough now to do realistic finger and toe rigging without causing an issue?)? Is there a specific bone heirarchy that has to be used for the Torque engines, or will additional bones work as long as the ones defined in the kork and various other character models exist?
I've never rigged a character for a game, and so far I still havn't figured out how to export an armature from Blender so that it functions in Torque3D when using the COLLADA format, so any advice would be much appreciated. At the very least I would like to use IK for character/eye-tracking, but as that's not a feature of the characters currently in use with the Torque engines, I bet that would require a modification of how the engine uses the meshes. Even if that's the case I can probably do the changes if someone points me to the right area of the engine.
