3DS Max Modular Character Design?

madmuffin

I'm talking about just about any 3D RPG out there, the characters for things like The Sims, how do you model so that say this person's head has multiple possible hair styles that in a game environment can be pick and chosen from a character creation screen? I doubt I'll have to make a separate model for every possible combination of parts, how is this normally achieved in the industy?

[Deleted User]

If I'm not mistaken, you just model them so they fit together.

madmuffin

I don't mean just fitting together. For example, if you have a bald hair style, and a full head of hair hair style, the character's head would still have polygons under the full head, assuming it is a segmented piece. If I made a shirt, it would have to exist over top of the original mesh, doubling the number of polygons since the skin is all still there underneath.

MoP

Or your game system would swap assets out, so as long as each part had a border which connected in the right place (eg. the waistline and the arm pieces for a shirt), then it would automatically line up when each piece was replaced.

The trick then is to have a consistent way of ensuring the borders are preserved correctly across all your assets.

madmuffin

I'm not sure I totally understand what you are telling me so he's a quick example I put together and I was hoping you could work me through it.



The far left is just a box I just made we can pretend is the lower torso and legs. Next to it is a second box that is a pair of pants. You can see when it's made transparent that the legs from before still exist inside it. The next pair over I've deleted all the non visible edges and unhidden the pants again. At this part I'm not sure where to proceed in what you are saying, the edges line up but this only works in this specific situation, how do I take this and apply it to many shapes and sizes of legs and pants?

Psyk0

-If you want to get away with borders not being aligned, cap the openings of the pants and shirt, that way you can scale them differently and they won't be hollow (might not be a good solution depending on the style you are going for).

-Be creative...use a buffer mesh to hide the pieces that dont line up...like putting a belt between the two meshes.

-I wouldnt leave the legs under the pants like you have in the 3rd model, sometimes the "under" mesh will clip through the top one, so cut the leg at the knee, merge the lower leg with the pants or use caps.

System

hah, done a bit of modding for the sims 2 so can answer that.
The face and hair cuts away from the rest of the model, all males and all females are physically identical except for these two parts so that all the animations work etc etc. Most diversity was accomplished by bodyshopping new textures, even with facial modifications you start noticing they all look similar.

madmuffin

Psyk0 wrote: »

-I wouldnt leave the legs under the pants like you have in the 3rd model, sometimes the "under" mesh will clip through the top one, so cut the leg at the knee, merge the lower leg with the pants or use caps.

That's exactly the problem I am posting about is that I don't want to make seven thousand different body meshes, one with no legs up to this point, one with no legs up to that point, one with no shoulders, etc. I'll probably end up doing a lot of texture swapping around in the final piece and cut corners.

Psyk0

Ok then build your "top" meshes with the bottom ones in mind, they need to share similar topology so that they can follow each other around closely, thus getting rid of the clipping.

Also if you're a max user, the skinwrap modifier is gonna make skinning a lot easier, it can transfer the weights from the base to the "new" mesh with pretty good results.