Rigging low-poly ("PS1 Demake") style characters
polycounter lvl 5
Hi Polycount,
I am a user of Autodesk Maya, so my terminology when talking about this may relate more directly to that software and its features.
There are some questions I'd like to ask regarding the rigging and animation of low-poly characters, but more specifically in relation to how legacy characters were animated on the original system.
This is my (very amateur/beginner) mesh I created when attempting to make a character in this style.
It is all one interconnected mesh around 975 tris. This character from Vagrant Story on the PS1 is modelled in similar fashion, as all its pieces are connected together.
(Image from this article)
Animating this proved to be difficult for me as a beginner, and I kept running into issue like this when trying to rig such a low poly mesh with such little experience.
I decided that for now it would be best to try another approach to modelling this style of character while I learn to understand topology better. That is modelling most parts of the total character as individual blocks of mesh. This was done in games such as Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil.
For example, I've highlighted parts of the right character's arm from Capcom's Resident Evil 2 on the PS1.
Here is the topology for my model recreated with this style in mind.
Now rather than warping the mesh itself, I could rotate one of the individual pieces like this to get a similar result as the previous image without distortion...
The current dilemma that I face is due to the fact that everything I've learned about animation so far relates to three things: Joints, IK Handles, and Skin Binding.
For a high poly mesh, these things make perfect sense, but for a low poly mesh it seems a little overkill, especially the skin binding. I think to myself, couldn't I just set up some joints and IK handles which rotate the individual objects that make up a limb rather than actually warping the vertices themselves?
Warping the vertices seems like an overkill solution to animating such a primitive model, and warping such as above (which can be fixed by skin weight painting) seems to me like a problem that doesn't need to occur if the IK Handle could manipulate the individual pieces directly at their pivot points.
I have been trying to paint an illustration of this issue from my current perspective. There may be an obvious solution that I have missed in my inexperience or misunderstanding of how certain things function, and perhaps you have some suggestions that I can try out for myself. Feel free to lend me any thoughts or advice that you have with regards to the animation and rigging of these PS1-style models.
I am a user of Autodesk Maya, so my terminology when talking about this may relate more directly to that software and its features.
There are some questions I'd like to ask regarding the rigging and animation of low-poly characters, but more specifically in relation to how legacy characters were animated on the original system.
This is my (very amateur/beginner) mesh I created when attempting to make a character in this style.
It is all one interconnected mesh around 975 tris. This character from Vagrant Story on the PS1 is modelled in similar fashion, as all its pieces are connected together.
(Image from this article)
Animating this proved to be difficult for me as a beginner, and I kept running into issue like this when trying to rig such a low poly mesh with such little experience.
I decided that for now it would be best to try another approach to modelling this style of character while I learn to understand topology better. That is modelling most parts of the total character as individual blocks of mesh. This was done in games such as Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil.
For example, I've highlighted parts of the right character's arm from Capcom's Resident Evil 2 on the PS1.
Here is the topology for my model recreated with this style in mind.
Now rather than warping the mesh itself, I could rotate one of the individual pieces like this to get a similar result as the previous image without distortion...
The current dilemma that I face is due to the fact that everything I've learned about animation so far relates to three things: Joints, IK Handles, and Skin Binding.
For a high poly mesh, these things make perfect sense, but for a low poly mesh it seems a little overkill, especially the skin binding. I think to myself, couldn't I just set up some joints and IK handles which rotate the individual objects that make up a limb rather than actually warping the vertices themselves?
Warping the vertices seems like an overkill solution to animating such a primitive model, and warping such as above (which can be fixed by skin weight painting) seems to me like a problem that doesn't need to occur if the IK Handle could manipulate the individual pieces directly at their pivot points.
I have been trying to paint an illustration of this issue from my current perspective. There may be an obvious solution that I have missed in my inexperience or misunderstanding of how certain things function, and perhaps you have some suggestions that I can try out for myself. Feel free to lend me any thoughts or advice that you have with regards to the animation and rigging of these PS1-style models.
Replies
You can do the same thing without breaking the model into parts, just select vertices and flood fill them with 100% weight value to the appropriate joint.
In fact this is a good way to troubleshoot your geometry... you can duplicate your model and make a few variations with extra edge loops in strategic places, copy the skin weights over, then carefully smooth out the weighting only where needed.
You workaround is fine too but it does change the way the models look and you are still skinning both ways so it's not like you are truly avoiding anything.