Beginner Question about game character modelling!
Hi people! I'm wanting to focus on modeling characters (or anything) for video games. I've taken an introductory course in modelling with Maya and we went over modeling characters sort of generally. Now I'm aware Maya has a "smooth preview" (when you press "3" on the keyboard) where it smooths out your mesh significantly. I mostly render with this, but it's to preview the max effect of the smooth tool right?
Now I'm super curious how video game characters are modeled. Are they smoothed (pressing "3")? I know the main difference between modeling for a game versus for a film is the polycount (is that the number of faces you have?), so how many polygons is appropriate for a game character for say... Unity? How do things like Zbrush and Mudbox come into play? What is "skinning"? Where online can I look to learn game modeling for free?
Thank you in advance to anyone answering!
Now I'm super curious how video game characters are modeled. Are they smoothed (pressing "3")? I know the main difference between modeling for a game versus for a film is the polycount (is that the number of faces you have?), so how many polygons is appropriate for a game character for say... Unity? How do things like Zbrush and Mudbox come into play? What is "skinning"? Where online can I look to learn game modeling for free?
Thank you in advance to anyone answering!
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/
The mesh that goes in-game is not subdivided/smoothed. For most modern game characters, a high resolution model is created with many millions of polygons using a combination of a 3d modeling package (ie, 3ds Max, Maya, Modo) and a sculpting package (ZBrush, Mudbox).
These high resolution models are usually modeled over into a low resolution version (a process called retopologizing) or otherwise reduced down to a more usable in-game resolution. A Normal Map, which is a texture that stores not colors but rather mathematical vectors (a math thing that is a direction and distance in 3d space) that indicate what direction each pixel is facing, so effectively each pixel is kind of like a vertex. The Normal in Normal Map comes from the term "Normalized Vector" which is a special kind of vector (a vector whose distance is always 1).
There are other kinds of texture maps that get used, but normal maps are a bit unique in that they are storing information related to the shape, rather than the color or material. Since these are pretty much impossible to accurately paint by hand, as they're a mathematical representation of something, people usually use a high resolution model and "bake" or "project" the normals from the high poly (where each vertex has a discrete normal) down to a texture that can be applied to the low poly.
Skinning, or rigging, refers to the act of weighting a polygon mesh to a skeleton for the purposes of animation. The "mesh" is the skin, and it is stuck to the "bones" of the animation rig, which form a skeleton that can then be manipulated by an animator to pose and animate the character.
Skinning has also been used to refer to painting a colormap texture for a 3d mesh, but this term is really deprecated and hasn't really survived past the Quake3-era.
Unity is a game engine with many potential uses, so your question is kind of like asking how long a piece of string is.
Depending on the use, a game character may stretch anywhere from 200-300 triangles, to 40,000+ triangles. A high end third-person console or PC game may use many vertices or triangles (the two common measurements of a game character's 'cost' - polygon is interchangeable with triangle in these measurements, as GPUs only see verts and triangles, not 4+sided polygons), and an iOS tower defense might use very few per character.
I would really recommend spending some time to learn how to search constructively to find answers to these sorts of broad questions - the reality is that any one person here isn't going to give you as much info on any aspect of your question as a thorough google search would. "How do I make videogame characters" isn't really a good search term or a question - you should instead spend time asking a bunch of very small questions on google (perhaps starting with "Maya Tutorial" and "Unity Tutorial" and reading a lot more to develop better questions.
I'm sorry for the ridiculously vague question! Your answers are incredibly informative though so thank you so much again for that!
I'll look through the wiki now, I hadn't noticed it!