Should a game of giants be made to scale?

pearlzu

If a human is about 200 units in Maya (with working units on cm), but 90% of the characters in the game are giant monsters that are over 4,000 units, should they be made to scale? This is for UE4.

I feel like they should be made to size just for a realistic consistency, but I'm afraid it might cause performance issues or rigging problems.

ActionDawg

200cm is about 6 foot 5.5 inches, a good deal taller than an average person. Yes, I'd make them to scale. It shouldn't cause problems other than probably needing good detail texturing if you get the camera up close to the giants.

pearlzu

Cool, I gave it a try. I have this rig in Maya LT 2017. The little grey box in there is a human scale - about 200 units. It more or less works normally, but if I move a controller and hit undo (image on the right), the skeleton effected looks wonky. You can see it in this screenshot.

I don't think a smaller rig did this. Also if I move the controller too fast Maya freezes up and crashes. Could this be the scale? Or maybe Maya being a butt.

claydough

probably will depend on your target dev pipe particularly if there are physics considerations?
Also animation considerations which might be as simple as speed/scale ratio formula to match a desired scale ( slo mo'd fer Giants )
Which is something like square root of scale yer werkn' on multiplied by the animation timeline's fps?
( tho thinking about as much in consideration of export/importing and game behavior hurts my tiny brain )

Farfarer

You can make them smaller if you like, but bear in mind that the physics engine probably expects realistic sizes... so things like gravity might act strangely if you don't make them to scale (gravity doesn't scale).

pearlzu

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I didn't know there was a formula for slo mo! I might give that a try. If I find out why the rig is being weird (and it's because of scale) I'll post that here.

pearlzu

I found out that Maya crashing was because of the scale of the scene, and it's an error that Autodesk is looking into. Turning off consolidate world in the VP2.0 options fixed it for now.