Scalable Characters - How Do You Approach It?

News & General Discussion
1

Where games offer more advanced Create-A-Character modes, they give the opportunity to scale things like height, limb length, girth, etc. How is this approached, especially without breaking animations that are designed with a particular height (like reaching out to grab something at 4 feet high). Are multiple animations made to compensate for that, or are there some kind of IK motion targets used?

What I’m trying to do:

I’d like to generate NPCs based on several different fields to create variety, including: Texture, attached objects, and body scale.

In 3DS Max, scaling bones generally breaks the entire mesh, and I don’t think morph targets are the way to go either. Then there’s also the concern of breaking skin morphs. How is this generally solved?

2

Why would scaling bones break the mesh? I wonder if that’s a 3DS Max problem… in Unity, I don’t believe it’s an issue.

3

You can look at UMA which is free for a solution that does that.

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4

It’s apparently a thing with model editors in general. I’ve heard artists using Maya complain about the same. Breaks the solvers, I believe. When you have your model in a game engine, all the animations are baked and there’s nothing being solved.

5

I was wondering if that tool would be a viable solution. Thanks!

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6

Right… but you’d be doing this bone scaling in Unity, not in the modeler, right?

7

That’s what I wasn’t fully certain about. For example, you create all your morph targets in your model editor.

8

Yeah, for morph targets that true, but bone scaling is pretty darn simple… I’d recommend just doing it in Unity.

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