High poly modeling finished. Time to make Low version and start most boring part Unwraping all these :smile: For unwrap I will use Unfold3D. I think that is most functional and user friendly software for UV.
I think, instead of removing the middle blade, you should shift some things around, so it's more like a halberd. Also grab a lot of reference to see what shapes could be functional, shouldn't hurt.
Update with the Custom Weapon a while back. Got a video of the model in UDK with some place holder effects and some of the functionality. [ame=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l-cGztzd08"]UDK Weapon: Sapper - YouTube[/ame]
I'm a maya guy :/ *5 minutes later* I just realized that Maya have the exact same function :P That's great, never looked for it. The beams are just 6 sided cubes. The highpolys look like this. Cheers!
The sand thing can simiarly be accomplished in fixed function pipelines by alpha color masking with a GE128 alphatest brick texture layer over opaque sand... i'm inspired to try that trick myself. Won't be as natural though
This doesn't work at all..there is no thought in how the character would be able to function. The tail is just hanging there, where are the muscles to make it move, how do they attach to the back? How does he support such a lopsided, heavy head?
Well the cintiq allows you to actually paint/brush/sculpt directly on an image/screen which is excellent. There are little functionality differences between the two (cintiq and intuos) however I feel it is more accurate just not significantly.
Motionbuilder is great for this, look into story mode (specifically clip matching) and animation triggers. Maya's new time editor should in theory allow for similar functionality but I found it to be more temperamental and less refined than motionbuilder.
To be honest, Blender spits out pretty solid and functional .fbx files for game engines to use, and it's getting even better quite fast in these days. So, at least I hope to use it most of the time in near future.
In Unity I'm not aware of a way to rig and animate with Quaternions, only Euler angles. You do have access in code to the Quaternions, and it has lot of helper functions to translate between Euler and Quaternions. The Unity docs on it are here.