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Animated Characters - A University Project

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#1

Hello everyone,
I’m trying to get an overview on techniques and programs which will help me to accomplish my university project

for the next term.

The goal is to model and animate three characters. Those will be a policeman, policewoman and a thief. As these

characters will be loaded into a real-time environment only low poly characters can be used. This brought me

ZBrush.

As far as I understood the various possibilities of this software, it is possible to create a low polygon model in

external software, like 3dsmax. I would then like to load this object into ZBrush and begin to sculpture the final

character. The next step should be the conversion of the differences between the initial low poly character and

the sculptured high poly model into a bump/normal/displacement map.

Is this possible, or is it even desired to work that way? Also, some questions came up. It seems obvious to me,

that I should sculpture the characters with clothings and give them textures right away. But how is it possible to

use these data for animation? I’m a bit lost, it seems to be that this could not work very well? For animation, I

will use motion capture data and would like to work in 3dsmax. I don’t have any experience with Maya yet, but you

would recommend me to really work with this software for some reasons, thats fine as well.

I’m basically trying to get an overview idea now of how to begin to work on this task. I hope that some of you,

which might have realized such things already, could give me some piece of advice. Where to start, how to work

with maps and animation.

Thank you,
Maik

#2

A lot of your questions can only be answered by knowing what type of game engine your using. If it is something like source or unreal you can check their documentation to see what is and is not possible.

#3

We will be using the Delta3D Engine, see www.delta3d.org.

This engine supports all kinds of mappings and the kind of file formats, which we need for animation.

I kind of need a little guidance of what’s the “normal” way to accomplish the given task.

#4

I think you should use whatever 3d program you are familiar with to do the modeling and animating. You can use zbrush to make a bump map for your models. There are guides for XSI and Maya here: http://pixologic.com/zbrush/class/zpipeline.html
You could search the forums for how to do it with 3dsmax.
You should not model the clothing seperately from the model if it is to be used in a game. Game engines cannot handle all of the collision data. Just make one solid model that integrates the clothing and character.
You might want to get a book like: Modeling A Character in 3DS Max
by Paul Steed.

#5

Thank you JohnnyBoy. I will take a look at that link and book. That’s exactly what I needed, a starting point. This will probably save me a lot of time.