Beth Darwin

[kinsman]

I'm starting some modelling work for a game I'm working on.

 

This is Beth Darwin, a girl in her early teens. The model is going to be used in real time, so I have to keep an eye on patch count - I plan to export it as a PLY at detail level '4' (8 polys/patch) and use my own converter to get it to SMD format (a nice, easy to understand format that Half-Life uses.)

 

Here's the character design - these pictures were drawn at two different times, and yes, there are some differences:

 

-Sean Givan

[kinsman]

Here's my progress after two modelling sessions of about an hour or so each.

 

-Sean Givan

[lazz]

So far its turning out pretty well. I'd like to see another picture of its finished. Your doing great on the patch count. Anyway, how do you make a game? Is it for a company? It sounds like a fun (but time consuming) project. Good luck with it.

 

Robert

[kinsman]

So far its turning out pretty well. I'd like to see another picture of its finished. Your doing great on the patch count. Anyway, how do you make a game? Is it for a company? It sounds like a fun (but time consuming) project. Good luck with it.

 

Robert

Well, making a game nowadays is easier than it used to be - there's a lot of game engines out there, free, cheap, and expensive. I picked GLScene, which lets me program in my favourite language (Pascal), is low level enough that I can muck around with the structure of my models, and is free under the Mozilla Public License.

 

It's not for a company - I'm going to sell it myself as shareware. There's a few sites on the Internet that make it easy to sell your own software, like RegNow or BMT Micro or Share It - or if you want something fancier, CafePress lets you print your own CDs.

 

And yeah, it is going to be a time consuming project, on the order of months and months.. Makes me wish I could find some extra artists or programmers, because I know it's a killer idea..

 

-Sean Givan

[lazz]

It would be interesting to see your progress on your project, so don't forget to post stuff as you move along. Does your game have an interesting plot? (I've always wanted to make a game, so seeing someone else do it is awesome.) Good luck

[KingSalami]

cool, be sure to show us some in game screen shots!

 

I see she has the "convienance crotch", I like this in a woman

[Ross Smith]

Patch count looks great, man. I get the feeling the face and head will be your hard areas. It takes a clever, clever modeler to make a good-looking _and_ expressive low-poly face. I cite the many crappy real-time faces that appear in video games.

You know, more than a few Hashers would be enthused to pitch in on a project like this.

[kinsman]

Progress is off and on, and rather slow, so I'm posting just to show how things are coming.

 

Ross, for the face, I'm thinking of making the expressions 2D - drawn on the face as a texture. When I was trying to decide, it was a toss up - I knew that I didn't have enough experience yet to make a good, malleable 3D face with only bones, but I was worried that a textured face would be considered backwards as far as technology went.

 

Then I saw that there were PS2 game like 'Suikoden' and 'Dragon Quarter' that had 2D faces - mostly for cartoony characters - and that made the decision a bit easier.

 

Also, I decided there was still room for textured faces to improve. Most of the animations on a textured face are minimally animated - eyes blinking, maybe 2 or 3 frames for the mouth opening and closing. I figured that I could keep up with the "eye candy curve" by designing a face with thorough, 20 frame-per-second animation - you'll see more later on.

 

Question for the audience - Beth's jacket here 'grows out' of the body about halfway down the torso. I did that to save patches, and I figure that texturing will cover for the details. Does it look OK to you all, or should I go back and spend some more patches on a fully-made jacket?

[Ross Smith]

Good point about 2D faces. I think you're on to something with that.

The jacket looks totally fine to me. Though I think you could suck in her belly a bit, just below the belt. imho.

[lazz]

I like the idea of the 2d face. I haven't seen the two games you mentioned, but I imagine its kind of the same idea with the latest zelda game for gamecube. The jacket looks well done (especially with such a low spline count.) But I'd have to agree with Ross about the belly, but perhaps its her entire waist that's a bit big. Also, were you planning on keeping the jeans detail on her pants like on the first picture? It didn't look too shabby for real-time. .