I am making my first major 3d character ( well, 2nd one anyway) ( he is looking pretty good actually), I just need to smooth em out, and finish with features, but he is only a head, a torso, and shoulders
I made him out of a single cylinder.
My question is this, do you make characters out of one piece and just keep shaping it? or do you add different pieces for the arms and legs? or do you have a separate piece for each part that you want to be able to customize ie different skins, picking different faces, phenotypes etc. so you can skin each piece independent of each other as apposed to one skin that just changes the whole character.
( keep in mind I want to do body part based skinning, ie if i want to change the head, or the arms so I can make him wearing different clothing etc and not just solid skins that cover the whole area, so I can have customization.)
The second part of the question is IF I make the pieces segmented do I still attach them with a boolean union ( its what it is called in True space, the program I use) OR do I keep all the pieces completely separate, and attach them with the ‘‘skeleton’’ that animates his movement, or attach them with code?
You have a strange aporoach in modelling. Using a cylinder like that doesn’t give very effective results for defining the human form. The human body or any forms for that matter have natural “flows” for which you should layout your polys in. Google edgeloops or topology and you will find lots of information.
As for dividing your character it is more convinient to model body parts seperatly anyway and stitch the edges together later on. If you need changeable parts I guess you leave them unstiched but still skinned as one. I’ve never done that myself though so someelse could chime in here
It’s really hard to explain how to model in text. Do some tutorials, because your method will get you nowhere. As for if you should model body parts separate or all as one body, I think you are getting ahead of yourself. You can weld together separate parts or split parts from a whole piece whenever you want as long as the vertices line up.
As far as what you need for an end result it depends on your needs. If you want different body parts to swap out, like 3 different arms that can all be used with one torso, then do them separate, but that’s advanced. Start learning how to model by extruding the edges of planes and using edge loops first. Also google model sheets and learn to bring images into your modeling program in the orthographic views to use as reference when modeling.
ok yeah, it makes more sense to keep things segmented so I can skin them seperately, so I will detatch his head too.
but I am just going to go out on a limb and assume that you can somehow do a polygon merge in unity with code so that body parts flex properly when moving ie like real flesh streching the polygons, so that it does not look like a ragdoll ?
And as for the cylinder guys, LOL i have to start some where, have to start with some kind of basic shape to mold out into something else, like clay. cylinder seemed better than starting with a square. didnt you see my guy? I thought he looked alright
He does look alright, but from what I can see, the edge flow does not. If you are planning on UVing and animating him, the topology really matters. I personally find it easiest to start with a cube rather than a cylinder, and I’ll bet that many other 3d artists do as well.
I prefer stripmodeling. I start with a single poly and extrude the edges to create the mesh. With this method I get good control of polyflow cause I’m basically laying in the edgeloops one by one.
Even when looking totally overwhelming at the first look, this is still one of the best human modeling tutorials on the net. And can be followed with trueSpace too. You don`t really need to do the whole tutorial. I once stopped after i have picked up and understood the edgeloop and topology thingie.
Thanks for the replies, and thanks mattmakesgames, I keep trying to learn blender but every time I do I find myself saying ““WTF”” and I just go back to truespace.
The question was still not answered however, can you merge the polygons in unity, so even though they are separate pieces they will move like one merged piece ( ie a human being ), so it does not look like a rag doll?
I’m pretty sure you can’t “merge” polygons in Unity but you create separate meshes in your 3D program, animate them individually and then put them together as a prefab in Unity so it would be like it is one object. Then I guess you can change the meshes which make up the prefab using scripting therefore allowing character customisation. (I know very little code but I assume that’s how people wold go about doing it.) I’m pretty sure there is a character customisation example somewhere on the Unity site. Hope this helps
There is a tutorial somewhere on making characters will customisation… when I model digital humans, I keep them segmented until I am ready to set it in Unity…and it also helps keep the draw calls low as possible…
Leaving a character segmented and applying Skin on every part creates unnecessary overhead. Unless you need to change parts in realtime. But even then one should consider minimising the number of separately Skinned parts. Everything that is possible to just link to some limb without deformations, should be linked instead.
