What's first, model, or skeleton?
by Brian Carlson · in Artist Corner · 05/01/2007 (11:17 pm) · 2 replies
Hello there. I think I've heard somewhere that whenever possible, use the same skeleton for all player models. So, would it be best to make a skeleton, animate it, and then just base all other models off that (people models for example)? Thanks for any help
Richard Cheek
You never want to try and fit a model to a skeleton, it would limit you way too much. The best approch would be to model a character, create the skeleton and rig etc. After this you can use the model, not the skeleton to fit other models to so that it can use the same skeleton.
The reason you want to use the same skeleton as much as possible is so that you can re-use animation on different characters, but you may find that the characters need different animations anyway, for example a sword swinging hero would have a different walk to a evil orc character, so in this case the same skeleton wouldn't matter.
Using the models as size reference has other benifits, you can reuse bits of one model for another. For example a group of soldiers might use the same boots or hands etc, saving modeling time as well.
Hope this helps a little,
Richard