Tori Miyazaki Concept to Engine (Heavy criticism needed)

#1 All I can say is wow. Great work on this. If you ever get a chance, please make a tutorial on how you made such fluid motion.

#2 Looks like motion captured animations.

#3 The only thing I might fiddle with is edge directions around the shoulders and hips. (Note that I'm a programmer, not an artist) Otherwise, pretty damned good.

#4 @Richard

What are edge directions?

@Dream

Yes these are all free motion caps from CMU and 3DS Max.

#5 No blinking ... seems a bit odd.

Lovely mocap.

He's a pretty boy, so I automatically hate him. :P ;)

#6 If you view the model in wireframe you should see the edges of the polygons. In 3DS Max you can flip the direction that the edges run so that you can control how the mesh deforms, and I'm pretty sure you can do this in any decent modeling application like Blender.

If you can get your hands on an copy of Paul Steed's character modeling book, perhaps at your local library if you don't feel like buying it, it covers this in extensive detail. Dude was a sick artist.

Also, Brad Strong's book is very good, though his models don't look anywhere near as good as Paul's. This book focuses on the technical aspects of getting art from Max to TGE, but you can sort of fudge the export part - DAE is easier to export than DTS was anyway.

#7
I'm thinking you are talking about edge loops? I didn't see that until you had me look and i did see some abnormal stretching on the shoulder. I added a new edge loop in the middle.

#8 You're displaying quads there - you need to show triangles, then you'll see it.

#9 I'm exporting quads into the engine do I need to be using tris for some reason? Performance mane? I alway thought tris were bad when modeling..

#10 Tris are awesome when modeling - how you export doesn't matter because it's always tris; quads are a convenience for the artist (though I'm not sure how or why). The hardware really only deals in tris; this is what polygon count refers to.

Using tris is also the only way you can really control mesh deformation. Any book on low-poly modeling will confirm this. You use the edge tools to turn the desired edges to match the "grain" of the joint so that when the model deforms it doesn't "kink".

#11 I'm looking through that book now for more understanding.

#12 Quads are sometimes easier for modeling, for subdivision for example, you can even have faces with more sides, like 5, 6, 7 and so on, but in the end it gets all cut down to triangles, it depends on what you like more.
You can fill the quads afterwards with tris, thats not the problem, but making quads out of tris is a little more complicated.

#13 This is excellent animation work!

#14 practice makes perfect, keep growing them skillz!
- animate hands or at least relax them.
- animate some facial stuff
- rig hair-ponytail and some of the front 'bangs'
- watch out for wrist collapsing; add more loops and weight blend them
- grab the vert at the front middle of the armpit area, click grow selection 2 times, blend the weights a bit as you have some srsly hard edged organic rig sections
- I wonder if there is 3 spine bones(torso) or 1, the animations play as if there is 1, very stiff upper body.

I do think you have a good start. Not many people have the patience to go through this stuff & so I commend you for that! stick to it! practice makes perfect, keep growing them skillz!

if you want some help or have questions that would help you learn faster/better..then feel free to send me an email. I don't mind helping those who take leaps to help themselves(YAY@motivation). ;)

#15 I was going to add Facial Animation Structure Be when I do I want a full system for my RPG Engine. And with the increased email requesting a release i will add this in a later release.

There are 3 spines all have an even envelopment of the chest. Is it controlling to much of the upper chest?

I'm going to try the arm pits thing and hope it doesn't explode. I've spent about 1 week working on the mesh trying to get a good flow for HP to LP flow. Then looking at rigging to improve. I've recently figured out that I've been placing the clavical bone too far out. I'm still thinking something id wrong with my bone placement in the legs because every time I have a U bend in the legs it makes me so mad and I have to tweek the envelop more that what should be needed. I'm also thinking i need to add glut bones.

#16 @ Frank

I wish I could say thanks but all of the motions are free mocaps.

Though I will be buying a second Kinect for mocaping myself.

#17 @Kevin,
The motion is not the whole story. The rest of the story and the most important is the bone weighting, vertex weighting/painting, joint setups, etc. That is a HUGE part of the animation process. So I still say it is excellent animation work.

#18 Kevin,

Nice work. I would go along with the overall view though. Bit more time adding weight to the movement. Also, have you got this model LODed? It maybe a tad heavy for a multiplayer environment. Additionally, like you, I tend to forget about tris when I am modleing, but it's a big deal with character art. Tris have more to do with joint deformation and stuff than you initially think. Put simply, each quad is 2 tris. This is why I have not released any of my animal models....sigh. (deformations suck). On the plus side: really nice texture work. REALLY good concept. Great use of motion capture and animation blending and timing.

Nice stuff overall. Oh yeah, Richard's book recommendations are great. I have both in my library, as well as a TON of bookmarks that go to tutorials on www.3dtotal.com/

Ron

#19 The main one will be LODed but I'm redoing the characters right now for my pack as they were extremely to high poly and no LOD. Plus they are ugly... I'm working on that now. I see the thing about the edges and I'm trying to do that in my next version of models. Also I'm not really interested in the MMO world right now. I just want to make something single player.

Also I love 3D total that is where I've learned all I know now.