I'm Making Low-Poly Rigged 3D DF Character Models. What Should I Keep in Mind?

[carademono]

I'd say Creator's Corner would be a better place to showcase your work. Looking forward to seeing the project progress!

[Ninelan]

I've refined the female base mesh geometry, adding edge loops and such, and i've tested it with automatic weighting for the rig, which is good enough until all the models are existing and textured and rigged. the female base mesh is about 5,000 triangles total, not including hair or accesseries per npc character/enemy.

should I move this thread to Creator's Corner, since it will become less technical and more about 3d asset creation than mod implementation at this point? i am new to this forum, so I am not sure, but either way is cool, whatever fits it best.

5000 triangles? That's a thousand shy from the resolution I'm working in that would not constitute as low poly anymore. You could probably collapse a decent chunk of the loops for a simpler look around the head and so. Other than that if you wanna stay at that resolution, you'll also need to up the textures.

In either case make sure the body animates well. I usually use auto rigging while modelling to quickly test the efficacy of the mesh.
The worst issues were around the butt, as it has to band in many different ways! But also hands and wrist rotations.

[westingtyler]

Thanks for the tips about the models and animating. You're right about 5k being a lot of triangles. I didn't plan for them to be so round, but It's where I've naturally ended up for a few reasons.

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For my game #NotSSgame, I have hundreds of characters, animals, and monsters to create. My dream is for them to look like hi-poly Pixar characters, but I know my skills are not there and that that level of quality takes a lot of time per character. Performance is another concern since there are potentially a couple dozen characters trick-or-treating or engaging in town events on-screen at once, and it's an open-world game that I want to function in mobile VR, so i get real paranoid about triangles, bones, and material draw calls.

I've gone with a low-poly aesthetic to make it practical to make hundreds of characters in a reasonable amount of time, and I don't use Asset Store assets because they can look nice, and I want the quality to mix well with my skill level, so I say I want nothing to look better than I have the skill to maintain, augment, complement.

It would seem going really low-poly like Playstation 1 or Thief Gold, would be performant and also easiest to create. But I've found it's not really true. Really low poly characters require a lot of time and energy to make best use of their economy to make them look, deform, and work great. The real time-save is in the simplified faces (and hands, but mecanim can handle hands for me).

I don't innately care about the low-poly PS1 style, but I respect its economy and thought it was the best I could do. But with the low-poly PS1 style I realized I was limiting myself for no reason, and making things look worse for no reason, and that adding some more edge loops, getting good base meshes, with faces that COULD animate later, takes little extra effort up front and makes my models more future proof, since my main goal with all this is to build a database of mix and match assets I can use moving forward for my own game projects such as #NotSSgame.

It was a shock to me a couple of days ago when I made my first test character (the swordsman lady), and I realized it looked better than I thought I could do. It's not near the quality of your models, but I realized what had held my previous characters back had not been my skill alone, but the low poly counts and low texture resolutions I'd held myself to arbitrarily that 1) looked worse to me, and 2) wasn't really 'easier' to make after all.

So now I think I've finally found the balance visually for a few details; I never liked GameCube/PS2 characters, and I realized I think it's because of the noses and ears, because they are detailed enough that the bad old lighting models would cause harsh shadows and make them look worse (no subsurface scattering), so for my base mesh I've kept the eyes, nose and ears simple, almost N64 level, with their details and lighting to be manually painted on, but I've allowed for a moveable jaw, and I've allowed the bodies to be more detailed - still as low as I can get away with - while deforming and looking closer to the Pixar level I dream of.

That's also why I started to get nervous after seeing my current skill level, because while my models aren't nearly as nice as yours, if you squint REALLY HARD, a layman might think they are stylistically from the same set, which would not happen if I stuck with the Thief Gold PS1 style I originally thought was all I could achieve, but that I would have been less happy with, with less future-proof models, and that's what made me feel like I was infringing on your style or at risk of getting in your way.

So I was never married to the PS1 style, but I thought it was all I could do, and have been pleasantly surprised at how much better my skill is than I anticipated.

I'll go ahead and start a Creator's Corner thread called "West's 3D Entities", just because it would be so cool to dump screenshots of new models as I make them and get more feedback, and since I LOVE seeing screenshots, I bet others will, too. I'm going to spend a few more days getting base mesh feedback, making different body types and genders, and making my own quadruped base, and gathering reference material before really starting going through the models. We'll see how far I get before I switch to another project for awhile. I'm trying to learn and plan ahead, but really at a certain point the best way to get experience, is just to start screwing up. I learned a massive amount from modeling 500 props from Ultima VI, pictured below, and I'm ready to try to get good, to try to get to a professional (but not AAA or photo-real, just nice) level, with character modeling, too.

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I've tried character creation a few times over the years, pictured below, and it's always seemed overwhelming and scary, but it doesn't now and seems really doable. At this rate I'll have Pixar quality by 2075, haha. (actually now that i have Youtube tutorials and actually use reference imagery, not trying to "be pure and do it all from my head" my rate of progress is much better.)

2022 3d chara progress small.png (552.97 KiB) Viewed 707 times

I'm just glad my skillset is at a level where I can actually contribute to the community (I'm considering starting with the enemies, Daedra Lords, weapons, and items), since even just a year or two ago, and definitely when I tried to help with 3d models for projects long before that, it seemed an insurmountable challenge. (I tried to model a skeleton and troll for the original War for the Overworld Dungeon Keeper fan game in like 2008 but had no clue how to do it well, pictured above.) Blender really is this thing with a giant learning curve, but after modeling for years, you start to be able to play it like a piano, and that's cool.

And really, if you or anyone ever has any more feedback or tips or hints for me, I want to hear it, so put it in my new thread or elsewhere so I can make my skills and assets even better, up to a professional level. That's my goal with my character creation skills.

[carademono]

Out of curiosity, did you do the above for the Dungeon Siege Ultima VI Project? A lot of those would look great in Daggerfall, if you wouldn't mind double-dipping.

[westingtyler]

I love the Dungeon Siege Ultima VI Project (although I can't play it nowadays because I can't get Dungeon Siege to work on Windows 10), but I never contributed to that awesome project.

Which models specificaly do you mean?
The mouse was when i was considering doing 3d animation in Cinema 4d, another way of making movies and telling stories. The skeleton and troll were my "submissions" for the original War for the Overworld game, a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper, back when it was just a fan game thing on keeperklan, before War for the Overworld became a real legit game. (in fact, the first time I heard of Unity was when it said "made with Unity" at the beginning of War for the Overworld in 2013 ish). The man and woman are from my game #NotSSgame, which this is all practice for.

I'd be happy to use whatever models I have for whatever project they make sense for.

Are you suggesting using the skeleton and troll in Daggerfall? like in John Doom's 3D Enemies mod? I'm actually gearing up to maybe do the daggerfall enemies first and wrote that I'd be happy to model the 3d enemies in Doom's thread, but the previous post in that thread was from january, so it may not be active now.

If someone knows how to put enemy models with animations INTO Daggerfall Unity, making, texturing, and rigging the models (and maybe then doing some animations) is something I want to do. Daggerfall doesn't have too many enemy types it seems, and I think I could knock them out pretty quick, which might look better than using my old 2007 Dungeon Keeper models. is that what you mean?

EDIT: oh you mean the ultima props. duh. I should have realized. No, I recently made those myself for my own Ultima VI fan game i'm thinking about in my head (AoS on my website). Most of them are basic "medeival props" which mean I can use them in my own games, too (probably not the Exodus statue, etc. as those are unique designs I don't own).