Home Technical Talk

Game models and clothing?

Hi all. I'm still in beginning stages & I'm having a difficulty understanding game characters and clothing. The first thing is it seems that game characters are modeled so that hey have no "flesh" under their clothes. Is this the way I should do it? What if I want my character to have multiple outfits with ability to change? Multiple outfits = multiple versions of my model with said outfits then?

Another thing is animating something like a trench coat for games. What would be the animation method that would export to a game engine (Unity/UDK?). I want to ultimately make something of a fighting game with one of these popular engines, but maybe a fighting game where you can also go and walk around in a 3d world, so some little bit of cloth movement would be nice.

Replies

  • chrisradsby
    Offline / Send Message
    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 15
    If you want to give your character the ability to have different clothing then yeah you should probably create a body for the character that you base all your outfits on. Then you need to decide if you want your character to have different whole outfits or if he/she should be able to change parts of the outfit. The different choices have an impact on how you should use your budget.

    The problem with having a body underneath the clothing is that you can experience a lot of clipping, ie the body clipping through the clothing so it's visible. It'll also end up as unnecessary detail that you can't see. So planning ahead and being smart with your designs is pretty important.

    I say take a good look at something like Guild Wars 2 for cool customizable armors and such. Doing that for a fighting-game would be trickier since the animations need to frickin slick. Very rare to see fighting games do that without it looking wonky.
  • acitone
    Cool. Thanks for the tips.

    I'm still confused as to how it works. Like if the game engine will need various models of my character already in the outfits or if it just needs one nude model that can alternate between outfits. In Street Fighter IV for example when Ryu is shirtless I dunno whether his shirted self has any skin under the clothes. That would mean there are multiple Ryu models.

    I guess for this sort of thing the best way to understand is to actually do it.
  • LoTekK
    Offline / Send Message
    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    The approach will depend on numerous factors, really. If you have a couple of alternate outfits, it may make sense to do the variations in your DCC app of choice, but it's just as valid to have a single base model with multiple clothing variations applied to it. In our game, we do the base mesh plus in-engine clothing items, but we get around the clipping issues (as well as wasted triangle rendering) by having predefined regions on the base mesh that get hidden based on the clothing item worn.
  • acitone
    That's a nice solution LoTekk, what engine do you and your company use?
  • [Deleted User]
    LoTekK wrote: »
    The approach will depend on numerous factors, really. If you have a couple of alternate outfits, it may make sense to do the variations in your DCC app of choice, but it's just as valid to have a single base model with multiple clothing variations applied to it. In our game, we do the base mesh plus in-engine clothing items, but we get around the clipping issues (as well as wasted triangle rendering) by having predefined regions on the base mesh that get hidden based on the clothing item worn.

    Interesting approach, do you bind mesh to bones and skin them accordingly with a single rig on a base mesh?
  • LoTekK
    Offline / Send Message
    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    Sorry, missed the replies on here.
    acitone: We're on a heavily-modified Unreal3 build.
    Yuze: Yeah, that's pretty much spot on. There's a single rig, morphable base meshes (body types for player and clothing items), as well as PHAT bones where applicable.
Sign In or Register to comment.