how to quickly create enemy characters

rbong obong

hello

so im a modeller working in a small group of 3 and im in charge of making all the enemy characters as the others are not modellers. the enemies will be demons and each will be VERY different and individual. our game will require up to 75 different demons and ive estimated each will take 3 to 4 weeks but this means it will take me up to 2000 days on my own to make. so my question is how to quickly make characters and easily make animations for them too. im using blender to is there a way to use animations on a completely different model? i am also looking to expand the team and find more modellers but that wont be possible unless i have some enemies in place for our demo.

can any blender user of modeller help me out?

also apologies if this is the wrong place to post as i thought it did not fit into technical talk.

thanks.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Couple of ideas:

1) Socketable accessories
2) Retextures
3) different weapons
4) enemy sizes

AtticusMars

I think it would be smarter to reevaluate the scope of your project.

Biomag

Don't get this wrong, but a game design that can't be accomplished by the team at your disposal is a bad game design.

Rethink your approach, study masters of the genere you are doing and understand what they are doing. 75 'very different' monsters is more than tripple A studios would do and therefore a horrible approach.

Think smart and lazy.

Starting point:
Modularity is your friend, lover and only reason for success.
Therefore start with following -> reduce the number of necessary rigs to an absolute minimum for your demons. Why? Because this means you will need less animations as they can be shared between all models that use the same rig without any issues (and in other cases depending on how similar the rigs are).

So now you should have about 2 to at most 4 rigs. This are you categories. Your monsters will have to fit those. Now if you are lucky, you might even have a animator that can start making the animations with those rigs even if you have not finished the models, but you can work in parallel without any serious dependencies til the end when you go back to polish the animations.

Now to modelling itself. Here comes what Panda wrote. This is how the top developers do, so don't try to outwork them. Be 'lazy'! You have a lot of work ahead of you anyhow. Don't push the matter just to add numbers. A modular approach gives you an important benefit: If you go back to polish a model, all those based on it are going to be polished at the same time too. Thus quality gets increased. You will never manage to achieve 75 completely different designs anyway, so take this weakness and make into a strenght and do it smart. For example make a orc - turn it into a leader, a shaman, a archer and a bigger brute - now take all 5 and give them war paint for the elite versions and the same 10 based on a different skin color scheme for a different race - your orc turned into 20 monsters. You have to do the anatomy once and after that just equipment - believe me this equipment can carry you very far (see Skyrim or any other RPG...).

Key for this approach is a very good planing phase and solid groundwork. Depending on your pipeline (high poly to low poly, just low poly with texture heavy work,....) you have to find the spot where your work influences the most of the project's results - for example the sculpts you are going to use for baking or the grayscale texture that's going to be the base for your different colors,... this are the key parts where you have to make sure to correct mistakes. Optimize your workflow and get rid of all issues right at the beginning. This will slow you down at the start of the project, but afterwards you can focus on the art part, without constant issues popping up. Fixing it once it will affect all others based on it.

A well designed pipeline can then also be shared with additional artists and will increase your overall speed drastically.

If you need more specific suggestions you will need to give us more details about your project (engine, tools, style, genere,...).

Sorry for the harsh sound of the post, but the planning of such things is key for the success of a project. Don't mess this up or your project will most probably fail. Never underestimate this phase and take it at least as serious as the monsters.

And now have fun with it and good luck to you and your teammates!

rbong obong

thanks everyone for the reply.
i discussed with my fellow team members the situation and from this we came to a new conclusion. we will be changing the art style of the enemies and will not be using normal maps. i am happy with the new choice of art style and it and our other optimizations will help us reach our goal faster.

thanks again guys!