My character’s head is sufficiently working inside Unity. All the animation keyframes I set up in Studio Max have been translated into Unity’s animation system and I have both an Animation Controller and code setup to control and blend the animations dynamically. The next thing I chose to do was give this character a body.
To create the character’s body, I go through the same process I described with the head. First I must model the shape starting from primitives.
I also modeled some hair using the top of the skull, from the head mesh. as a starting point.
Next I unwrap or flatten the 3D shapes so that I can create a bitmap texture for them.
I gave a texture pattern to the clothing to create some visual difference between it and the skin tone. I also gave a bit of a painterly look to the hair. Not sure if this is the final look of how this or any other character will appear in the final product, but it gives me a starting point. I put the symbol that they put on crash test dummies on his shirt because he is going to be the test dummy for the beginning of this project.
Not sure if I will keep the textured look to the clothing or not because I am cautious about crossing too far into the realm of photorealism. I lean towards the slightly cartoony look for many reasons. It would be unrealistic for me, as a solo developer, to accomplish photorealism. I also think the more you attempt that the more you fall short and you can actually ruin the suspension of disbelief while interacting with the material.
I really like how Disney is handling the character design for Disney Infinity; flat colors, unique silhouettes and little to no textures. I may try to stay closer to that in my final character designs, we’ll see how it goes.
Next I use the same lights that I did for the head and bake them into the bitmap of the texture.
Now I am ready to rig or Skin the body with bones for movement.
If you haven’t figured it by now, creating 3D characters can be a tedious, time consuming process. Here’s a couple of tips that I use whenever I am modeling a humanoid character.
First, I know I am going to need more than one character for my finished project. I want to save time and reuse as much as possible from this first character in my other characters. One way I am doing this is keeping the head model separated from the body model. This way I can swap heads later.
Second, this body model is obviously a male body. Later I will need to make some changes so I can have a female body as well. The majority of those changes will happen in the torso area. I have made the torso as a separate mesh in the body.
The other meshes that make up the body include the hands, the legs and the feet.
Keeping the parts of the body as separate shapes will give me several ways of building variety into the different characters while saving me time but not having to re-unwrap or re-skin the shapes that are reused between characters. If I need a different shape, I will be able to swap out a part rather than the entire body.
Third, I know from experience, that I need five divisions of geometry in each joint of my character’s body. I need these divisions to ensure the minimal amount of proper deformation that the mesh will need to exhibit as the joints bend. This concept is best displayed in the bend of a finger joint or in the bend of a knee.
There are 50 joints in my character’s body. Not surprising since there are 30 joints in the hands and fingers alone. I used the bones to place the character in a seated position and I also did some keyframes to give him a little, impatient, motion loop while he sits.
I obviously also modeled a chair desk here as well.
Here is a link to complete demo of everything I have done so far. I wrote some code that adds random blinks to the eyes, but other than that, all the key triggers for the head animations are still active and you can find them below.
A – close eyes
S – open mouth
D – smile
F – frown
G – eye brows down
H – eye brows up
J – one up one down eye brows
K – wide open eyes
Q – rotate head down
W – rotate head up
E – rotate head right
R – rotate head left
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