[headerko]

Hi headerko!

I'd be happy to share some tips!

Originally Posted by headerko

The thing is me and my friend would like to, at least try to, make a mmorpg game. It will take ehm at least 2 years to realease the first playable version and i am well aware of that. You could say we are doing more "learning" for now.

Two years is pretty good for an MMO, even for a pro team. FWIW, nearly every game I've worked on has taken somewhere between 18-24 months, and none of them had any massively-multiplayer components except Tiger Woods which had the "Play Against the Pros" thing. MMOs often take quite a bit longer.

Don't feel like you have to wait on a "playable" until you have the whole thing though. The best thing to do is set small milestones for yourself, where each milestone is a playable--albeit very incomplete--game. Pick one feature for each milestone and see it through to completion. The first "build" of Speeding Ticket was literally a car and a lamppost. Ditto for Splashdown, a jetski in a puddle. Seeing something working is a great way to keep up enthusiasm when it gets tough! But more importantly, it means you always have a working build. As they say "100% of the features 80% complete is of no use to anyone, but 80% of the features 100% complete might well be a perfectly shippable product."

Originally Posted by headerko

Anyway, he needs some character he could start practising with. And thats whats supposed to be my role, heh, and thats where i need your guidance
The game will be made in java 3d (he is obsessed with it, so theres not much i can do about it).

Java3D isn't such a bad choice if you wanted to make it a browser-based game... Runescape for example may not be sexy, but they did manage to sell quite a few subscriptions and got other good gigs from it, like the Hello Kitty MMO. Java's not the fastest thing in the world but if you plan your art carefully you can still do a lot with it, and the learning curve is not too bad.

Again, just plan around what the engine can and can't do. Remember, your wrist watch has more computing power than most of the older consoles and handhelds, but look what great games there are for those systems!

Originally Posted by headerko

To the point... the things i would like to know are what "Steps" one has to make when creating a character for a game. The most important part is, how do you specify how the parts of the model will animate in the game. I see everywhere some model rigging, like creating a simple skeleton like structure in the model and then somehow gluing them together? That's where i am a bit confused And can this rigging be done in AC3D as well, or do i have to use something else (e.g. Blender?)

Hmmm... this is terrifically over-simplified, but here goes:

- Concept art. Always, always, always have a concept before you start. It's a lot easier to fix an idea than it is to fix a model. It's not just about having cool ideas, it's also about planning how you're actually going to achieve the character. How many polys? What features? i.e. Older games have an awful lot of characters wearing kneepads and elbow pads not because kneepads are so cool, but because you don't have to skin the joints if the armor is placed carefully. Is your engine really good at something? Think about how you can show that off, too!

- Think about what parts are going to animate in the concept phase. Some people sketch the skeleton, too, as a series of balls where each joint goes with a line connecting them showing the heirarchy. Once you've done a few models you probably don't need to sketch the skeleton every time, but it's important to have an idea of what you're going to do. Another important thing, especially for MMOs, is deciding whether or not you are going to share skeletons between multiple characters. This cuts down on animation data *a ton* so it's a really good thing, but it's often hard to retarget a skeleton from one character to another if their proportions are radically different. If you plan on sharing skeletons, you'll want to plan which characters can share. Fat and thin doesn't matter (to a point), but you'll want to watch things like the distance from the pelvis to the shoulders or from shoulders to the elbow.

- Build the model. There are of course a million opinions on how to go about this part. I'm partial to box-modeling myself, but it doesn't really matter which technique you use as long as it gets the job done. Important things to watch for if you want to animate, especially for games:

a) Interior faces. If a surface can't be seen, delete it. That goes for the bottoms of coffee mugs, the backs of buildings, parts of the character underneath their clothes, etc. This saves polys, and it also saves time when you go to assign surfaces for animation.

b) No t-joints. A t-joint is where you have to faces meeting together with a third face that spans the top edge of the other two faces so it looks like a letter-T. These tend to crack and mess up your texture mapping. http://escience.anu.edu.au/lecture/c...age/tjoint.gif

c) Joint deformations. This guide has really good pictures: http://www.pig-brain.com/tut02/tut02_01.htm Sometimes depending on your engine, you may need to make some variations. The legs on my dog, for example, use the same basic layout shown in the tutorial with a "pyramid" on the back of the joint so they collapse properly. But, my joints also have a slice across the front--normally a bad thing--becauseI knew both the engine I'm targeting and Poser weight the joints differently than other tools and I needed to split the joint into two materials because of that. It's also not obvious from the picture, but the dog has a large number of dummy joints especially in the head specifically to control how the different parts blend together. For example, there's a dummy joint between the head and the eyes, so that when I move the head it doesn't cause the eyes to move or deform. Ditto for the ears, jaw, and tongue.

I *highly* recommend just building some basic joints and animating them until you get a feel for how it works. Make a tubeworm with a really long spine for your game.

d) Edge loops. This sort of falls under "joint deformations", but basically anywhere you have muscle groups that can deform you want smooth rings around the area so it flows from one part to another. This is especially important around mouths and eye sockets. http://cube.phlatt.net/home/spiraloi.../modeling.html Also: http://www.et.byu.edu/~csharp2/index_files/image043.jpg / http://www.et.byu.edu/~csharp2/#G_Edgeloop

Now, ironically, the second tutorial link there says this is impossible with box modeling. Not so. "Make hole" is fantastic for starting a loop from a model created with the box method. Make a hole, then use "create ordered surface" to fill it. You have your first loop. Select the ring around the surface you just created. You can use divide loop as many times as you want to create a series of concentric rings from which to build as many loops as you need to sculpt it out. It's also possible to do this by extruding and then scaling the extrusions back smaller than the original surface.

- Do a motion test. (optional) If you're not sure if your joints are going to work, you might want to pull a work-in progress version of your model into your animation software to test the joints. (More on how to do this in a moment.) You don't need to "rig" the model completely to do this... a couple of bones, even if they aren't adjusted properly, will usually tell you if a joint is going to pinch or tear without spending a long time making a rig that you'll have to throw away. Make any adjustments to your geometry until you're confident its exactly as you want it. If possible, import it into your game engine and make sure it looks okay there, too.

- Texture map your model. Some animation software makes you start *completely over* if you don't uv map your model before you rig it, so I generally try to do at least the texture layout *first* even if I don't paint the actual maps right away. A few texture tips:

a) Most game engines require square-powers-of-two for the textures. (1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 8x8... 256x256, 512x512, etc.) Even when it's not required, square power-of-two generally performs much better.

b) Most games use "unified maps", meaning everything for the entire model fits on one texture map. (Unlike film where one model may have dozens of textures.) Occassionally for characters the face/hands and the uniform will be different maps, especially when the uniform can be swapped or shared between multiple characters.

c) Give the most space to the parts of the model that are most important versus the parts that are largest. i.e The face might take up as much as a quarter of your map, but the bottom of the shoe only a few pixels.

d) Leave a little border between parts and around the edge of your texture if you're going to use mip-mapping. If you don't leave a border and you turn mip-mapping on, the colors on your textures will bleed together and you'll get visible seams or "sparkling" along the edges. For a 256 map, I usually use 240 pixels. This gives an 8-pixel border, which means it can mip-map all the way down to 16x16 before the colors start to spill all over each other. If you can't afford space for borders, try to put similar colors next to each other so if it spills it won't be so obvious.