Nine's 3D people

Show off your mod creations or just a work in progress.
User avatar
Ninelan
Posts: 187
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:30 am
Location: Under your bed
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Ninelan »

King of Worms wrote: Wed Mar 09, 2022 5:51 pm This one is a great match, really good job
Thank you!
I also have to announce, that I'm very close to completion! Horaaay.
At least when it comes to clothes.
Look at this situation!
thesituation.png
thesituation.png (250.5 KiB) Viewed 2401 times
Just 7 more full clothing articles, various hairs and minor tidbits.
Then just faces and we might be ready to start assembling the mod.
You can support me and in turn my art on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/fireflyness

User avatar
MrFlibble
Posts: 410
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:43 am

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by MrFlibble »

Very impressive!

Anticipateants
Posts: 17
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:10 am

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Anticipateants »

Very fitting for the game, model really feels a part of the world. Would love to use this.

User avatar
Ninelan
Posts: 187
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:30 am
Location: Under your bed
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Ninelan »

And you may just as soon!

When it comes to modelling we're in the last leg of the race.
what can I say but Soon™ actually soon.
You can support me and in turn my art on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/fireflyness

User avatar
Seferoth
Posts: 665
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 5:45 pm
Location: Finland

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Seferoth »

Really cool and ambitious mod. Looking forward seeing it "completed"...whenever that may be.

User avatar
westingtyler
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2022 1:00 am
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by westingtyler »

not sure if you need this, but here is an atlas I compiled of all the portraits using Daggerfall Imaging, RenameIt, and Free Texture Packer. I think they are all here, but I didn't do any content sorting, though. once I made sure each name had "leading 000s" Free Texture Packer sorted them correctly, on a 2048x2048 atlas with "bottom left rule" and trim and rotation disabled.

SORTING:
If anyone wants to, these could be sorted in a program like paintshop pro, where you can turn on a 64x64 grid and enable grid snapping, then just swap them around to your liking. when I sort atlas contents I usually just lower sections to create "working gaps" in the image, so I don't have to scroll around all the time while sorting specific sections.

there are not technically any duplicates here, but it seems like it because apparently unique quest NPCs have a gold rim around their images, which are otherwise the same as some generic ones. so that is an interesting "cue" to players that an NPC is important, that I never noticed before. but for your 3D People Project, this means these are just duplicates to delete.

Incidentally if anyone DOES sort these into useful patterns and categories, it would help me as well if you repost the final image for my reference, too. if no one else does, eventually I may end up doing it (100 years from now), but right now i'm working on my own full body atlas set for my own modeling.

And Nine, if you post details about the kind of sorting you are looking for, I will keep it in mind if I do eventually sort them, since you seem to do these taxonomies pretty well. "sorting them by identical facial features and hairstyles" is all the info available so far. would you want "rimmed" duplicates deleted, as well as "same portrait but different color background? and what about skin color - if two portraits are identical except for skin color? should one be deleted? and if there are multiple "same face and hair but has a hood" ones, should the hood ones just be deleted? and what if two portraits are the same, but the clothing shirt is different? just post specs. again i can't guarantee i'll end up doing this, but specific details would help in my consideration.

This atlas contains 571 faces I think (32x18-5). Searching the Daggerfall files in Daggerfall Imaging, this seems to be all of them. The 11 child faces start after the first glowing green bald face guy.
_daggerfallportraits.png
_daggerfallportraits.png (878.4 KiB) Viewed 1779 times
Last edited by westingtyler on Mon Apr 18, 2022 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
westingtyler
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2022 1:00 am
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by westingtyler »

and in case this gives any value or is cool for reference or study, here are the character portraits including vampires and children, tightly packed. each is basically 38x38, and it's trimmed, so it's not a power of 2 texture size, which annoys me, but it's better than it being 1024x1024 with almost half of it empty.
_daggerfall player portraits tightly packed.png
_daggerfall player portraits tightly packed.png (112.73 KiB) Viewed 1780 times

User avatar
Ninelan
Posts: 187
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:30 am
Location: Under your bed
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Ninelan »

westingtyler wrote: Mon Apr 18, 2022 4:52 pm -SNIP-
The images by themselves are easily enough accessible via Daggerfall imaging 2 , but thank you for the thought! IT should prove a nice template for later.

To sorting:
It really comes down to 'what would be useful sorting in recreating the faces to make sure you either don't miss something or waste time making a duplicate' As how the faces are ordered, it's basically a mishmash that's all over the place and if one were to go 'down the line' you'd end up wasting a lot of time.
Sorting the NPCs by body weight and anatomy type in comparison was slightly time-consuming but not that difficult.
Even though body dype for women is ATM not represented yet it is something that will happen in a future update. :D

Here's a good example.
faceregions.png
faceregions.png (16.42 KiB) Viewed 1744 times
The bottom two faces have the exact same facial features mouth/nose and eyes/brows included, the top face has the eye/brow region different.

I would place identical faces in a hierarchy following face shape, then mouth/nose and then eyes/brows.
OR use colour coding pixels to denote 'all of these faces have the same eye shape.' this colour for mouth, this for hair, etc. And put them in the corners where they don't detract from the image.
The point is to quickly identify 'I already did this' material with a quick glance. or I already did this asset so I don't need to recreate it. Similair can be done with 3D models, merging eye shapes with mouth shapes etc. and making sure you have all combinations done.

And another sorting dedicated to hair/beards

Skintone is something you can easily pick off a glance like here.
facetlas2.png
facetlas2.png (12.13 KiB) Viewed 1744 times
However skintone is something that will require separate texturing. The way I'm doing it at least.
You can support me and in turn my art on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/fireflyness

User avatar
westingtyler
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2022 1:00 am
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by westingtyler »

Thanks for the info about arranging the portraits. gosh it would be so nice if they had for no reason included the layered PSD file of all the face parts on the disk. then they could even be dynamically swapped out at runtime to generate new faces.

Also, I have a bunch of questions!

1) are these characters you're working on rigged? and if so are they custom rigs or rigify with automatic weights? or are the characters more like statues?

2) are you using the original portrait textures in your face textures, or are they totally custom paintings, sampling the colors and such?

3) what is the texture atlas resolution for each character? it looks like a good balance.

4) "chimera modeling"? does this mean taking sections from some models for re-use, such as jaws or modeled hands? if so, do you make special care to ensure the outer edges of those line up, like if hand wrists are octagons, that your new model arms are also octagons, for easy stitching?

5) let's say you modeled and textured a nude woman with textured hands and such. do you reuse this base texture for each new model? what if you alter the shape of a future model, and have to re-unwrap it, and it doesn't line up with the old texture? do you then have to in and smudge the texture to bend it to fit, or likewise push and pull the uv vertices?

6) and if you are like copy pasting the hand texture to each new character atlas for re-use, is that really just manually opening a paint program, copy pasting it somewhere in a new image, and then re-unwrapping the new hand in blender, then lining up the vertices to match, like where the fingernails should be? or is there some special way to say "hey blender, bake this part of this mesh's texture onto this other mesh in this way?"

7) if you are doing a bunch of clothing and hair, then merging them and stitching them onto the nude bodies, have you considered making the clothing/hairs "interior-solid" and then doing a boolean merge? would that be a no-no for some reason?

8) if you are re-using clothing and hair, are you doing something to merge the clothing/hair texture onto the body texture to create a single material? or are you leaving it where each character has a few materials? i am paranoid about draw calls. if there is some way to tell blender "okay now that i've merged the pre-made, pre-textured clothing, hair, and body geometries, put all the textures of this model onto a new single atlas, keeping the uvs intact" then I want to know about it!

9) are you doing anything with the faces, as in, edge loops, mouth interior, teeth, blendshapes, eye bones, etc? These things add a LOT of possibilities, but they are so much work that i decided to go with just a simple static head for each, like PS1 or N64, but i'm wondering if I'll regret it later when if I ever want the characters to emote. I've considered doing what some Zelda games do, and just having slightly different eye and mouth textures (blinks, smiles) i can script to swap out at run-time. what do you think?

10) are you using some standardized uv map parts arrangement? I looked at how the legs, torso, head, etc. are arranged in the Sims 4 character template, and it would allow easily swapping body textures between models if wanted. or are each model's texture map uniquely arranged and swapping them out would look weird?

11) do you have a standard human or male or female basemesh you copypaste, then adjust for the next one? if so are you careful not to add triangles or re-unwrap so the base body texture doesn't get bent out of shape across the body?

12) do you use any special tools like RetopoFlow 3? In the past I've sculpted characters in Oculus Medium in VR, then it seems possible to retopologize the exported model in Blender, but I haven't tried that. VR sculpting is really cool.

Anyway, your project looks really cool, and I look forward to seeing it progress!

User avatar
Ninelan
Posts: 187
Joined: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:30 am
Location: Under your bed
Contact:

Re: Nine's 3D people

Post by Ninelan »

westingtyler wrote: Tue Apr 19, 2022 7:01 pm -
1) They're fully rigged by hand, the base is handled with automatic weights and then retouched by hand, and clothes are mostly weight painted by hand to avoid weird deforms. They are also animated fully by hand.
Tool generated armatures and animations and such generally seem lacking to my purposes, as I have about a dozen or so auxiliary bones for hair, clothing and other deforms as they're not being handled by simulations.
2) Yes. The facial UV is done so that I can reuse bits of the face and morph it into the UV. Then followed by retouching to make it nicely blended.
3) Power of two. Small bits get smaller texture, more detailed bits get larger textures. You inherently know what size to use by how it looks on the model.
4) I first made the horse model, gave it good topology, rigged and finished the armature. I then turned that horse into a cow, fixed the face, hooves etc. Just by moving around the body, adding extra loops or collapsing them. Then i made it into a pig, then into a million other things. If I were to do a centaur I'd just take the horse model and pop a human on it.
Animtions are also cross-mesh and armature compatible that way.
5) Make the model perfect on first pass. A little bit of inflation deflation or verticle rearranging won't hurt the texture one bit, especially if the edit is within the bounds of the unwrap.
6)I don't, it would be too much work. Just have a single body texture that's separate from the rest and mix and match the various hairs, accessories and clothes as need be.
7) No, not required at all, if I'm not mistaken boolean merge is also a bit ugly in certain instances with the creation of n-gons you then need to clean up... I just delete the invisible body parts!
8) I'm doing no merging. Merging all textures together poses its own set of issues like the inability of ordering rendering priority when it comes to transparency and lack of flexibility. Draw calls become an issue in the high ends you'll likely not reach for such a project. At most there's only one single person in any given house and maybe 6 in an inn or guild.
9) it is a must if you want to animate the mesh. The most complex rig on my models is around the butt area due to all the bending it's required to do while sitting and contorting like they're a gymnast. Edge loops are not just for faces.
As for texture faces, that's something I won't be able to help you with and you'll need to check out animating textures for unity.
10) In a way yes. Just for parts that require such. Like eyes faces or bodies and hair. Clothes on the other hand each have their own unique unwrap.
11) I don't copy-paste the base mesh, I just make the clothes fit. This works for women as their anatomical diversity in Daggerfall is less than what we see for men. There is only extremely voluptuous and slim. Which I can easily just do by making a second body mesh and inflating/deflating it slightly, same with the clothes that fit on that anatomy. Only requiring inflation/deflation to have a fit.
12) No. I just make the model with the correct topology from the start. Sculpting and similar is not required or needed for the style I'm chasing.

This part of the project is virtually complete, All I'm working on right now is assembling it in unity.
You can support me and in turn my art on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/fireflyness

Post Reply