3D Models, Textures and Bone Animations for Games.

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3D Models, Textures and Bone Animations for Games.
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Overview

• Tools Advantages Disadvantages
• Low-poly models from scratch
• Texturing UV maps and skins
• Bone Animation setting up skeleton, inverse
  forward Kinematics

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The Tools

• Blender
• Maya
• 3DS
• Wings 3D
• Ultimate Unwrap
• Caligari Truespace
• Photoshop

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Blender

• Pros
• Free, Relatively Powerful.
• Can do skeletal animations.
• Easy to import/export.
• Cons
• Learning Curve
• counter-intuitive, clunky interface.

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Maya

• Pros
• Extremely powerful.
• Well documented.
• Elegant, fast interface.
• Becoming industry standard.
• Cons
• 2,000.
• Very good, but not excellent UV mapping

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3DS

• Pros
• Very powerful.
• Similar to Maya
• Cons
• Expensive.

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Wings 3D

• Fast.
• Easy to use.
• Can make excellent Low-Poly models
• Cons
• No animation / UV mapping.
• Hard to make complicated / High-poly models

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Ultimate Unwrap

• Pros
• Best UV mapping tool on the market (in my
  opinion)
• Very fast, simple interface.
• View texture on model in 3D environment.
• Automatically updates texture when saved
• All the functionality of more expensive tools
• Cheap (70)
• Cons
• Only good for UV mapping
• Not directly compatible with Maya
• Need to juggle model formats .obj -gt .mb

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Caligari Truespace

• Pros
• Relatively powerful
• Decent skeletal animations
• UV mapping
• Cheap (couple hundred for latest version)
• Cons
• Extraordinarily awkward interface
• Somewhat slow

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Photoshop

• A necessity
• Uses Layers
• Highly Versatile tool set
• Great for creating skins to texture models

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3D Modeling Technique

• Art through extrusion
• Minimize Polygons

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Art through Extrusion

• Start with basic shape (cube)
• Extrude a Face
• Adjust size of face
• Collapse vertices / edges to make angles
• Repeat above
• Use Symmetry

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Minimize Them Polies!

• Use triangular points (when possible)
• Focus attention on salient areas
• Rely on texturing for detail keep it simple
• Orient human models in standard position (shown)

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Some Buildings

• Both lt 20 polies

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Some Space ShipsBoth lt80 polies
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UV / Texture Mapping

• Different Types
• Methods
• Minimize Size of Images

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Theres more than one way to Skin a Cowboy

• Face Painting
• Paint a fixed texture to individual faces
• Pros easy, fast
• Cons looks atrocious up close
• Materials
• Apply a material or surface texture to a face
• Phong, Metallic, etc.
• Diffuse, Ambient, Emissive, Specular, lightings
• Pros Looks really good.
• Cons Requires in-game light source. Expensive.
• UV Mapping
• Unwrap polygon model to flat surface
• Paint a picture over unwrapped polies
• Pros Can make low-poly models look good!
• Cons Difficult to learn / do well.

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UV Mapping

• Import Model
• Unwrap as desired
• Create Texture

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Import Model

• Disorganized UV map

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Unwrap Model as Desired

• Many Different Types
• Box, cylindrical, plane, etc.
• Make it easy to paint
• Conserve space
• Devote more space to salient parts

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Paint Texture Onto Model

• Use many layers (Photoshop / PSP)
• Low opacity Air Brush for shading
• Darken Edges Brighten centers of polygons
• Gives a more rounded appearance
• Keep textures small!

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Skeletal Animations (Maya)

• Set up Skeleton
• Organize bones into Hierarchy
• Inverse / Forward Kinematics
• Skinning Your Character
• Get the MOST from your model

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Set up Skeleton

• Maya Skeleton -gt Joint Tool
• Be anatomically accurate
• Start from pivot work outward
• Use at least 2 perspectives

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Use Mirror Joint

• Orient Model to the Origin!!!
• Only way to ensure symmetry
• Much easier
• Mirror Joint
• Select highest-order bone hip
• Maya skeleton -gt mirror joint

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Use Hypergraph

• Label bones
• Organize into hierarchy
• Click / drag

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Bind to Skin

• Attaches skeleton to model
• Maya skin -gt bind skin -gt smooth bind
• Set max influence 1
• Too many slows down in-game animation

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Time to Animate

• Set a neutral pose
• Select All
• Key Everything at time -10

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Inverse Kinematics

• Use IK Handles
• Maya Skeleton -gt IK Handle Tool
• Allows fast and positioning

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OH NO!

• Sometimes difficult to get specific pose
• Then use Forward Kinematics

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Have animation reference

• Easy to google
• Search for image displaying desired animation
  keyframes

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Loop Animations

• Save Effort Copy / Paste Keyframes
• Click on keyframed object / IK handle
• Right click on Maya Timeline -gt copy
• Move timeline -gt paste

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Create more animations

• Skip a few frames
• Select all
• Key all
• So animations dont interpolate between each
  other
• Skip a few more frames
• Have at it!

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Export your Animation

• Can download exporter from Ogre3d site