FreeGameDev

charlie: originally a response to: viewtopic.php?f=65&t=2367#p25126

Looks great mate! I too would be curious to know if there is a transition.

I was poking around in the C thinking about splatting today, doing it on our terrain will take quite an unusual implementation, I have asked a programmer friend to take a look at it, can't promise anything, but he loves challenges like that. I also showed my workmate, and he wants to do some 3d art for us as well. I also spoke to character/concept artist who is keen to join in too, I've sent him the wiki link for the five races, he is going to attempt some proper multi perspective concept art, he is busy, so it might take a while.

In the meantime I've been playing with the current Aer models. The existing ones are lower poly than they could be, they also have occluded geometry and internal faces, so they are rendering far slower than they should. By optomising them a bit, I can raise the poly count without losing performance, it should also help raise the visual appeal of the game.

Aer Female Front


(finer facial features, raised jaw, tweaked shoulder/waist/hip ratio, made curves more curvy, slenderised and smoothed feet and hands)


Aer Female Back


(wider thighs, improved knees, changed curve of thighs and calves, lowered ankle)

Aer Female Side


(head more skull shaped and moved back, jaw raised and clarified, now has a slight belly, bum and breasts more rounded and perky)

And all that in 3100 polys!

I've also done a bit of work on the male, although mostly around the face, elbows and chest/back so far, so take this as a work in progress.


Aer Male Back



Even if these just function as alternate shape key bases, their increased poly count should allow players to alter their own character more effectively.


And just for fun, I did some concept art for Chara's Root Cave

Hey p0ss, great work. I updated your img tags to use the large thumbnails (i.e. add an 'l' before the .png - bLMBA.png -> bLMBAl.png) as I was only getting the tips of the fingers on 1024x768 - although they now no longer link to the original hi-res images. (There is full thumbnail image / full image link embed codes on imgur though I didn't want to go through it for each image.)

Thanks for that tip Charlie, much appreciated

Nekotaku, when is a good time to catch you in IRC?

Here are the side by side comparison shots against the current model, I posted them in chat, but I thought I may as well add them in here as the show the changes more clearly.
face



I think the hands still need work, the fingers look like sausages now. and the back of the skull could stand to be a bit higher.



the toes are still quite blocky



and some small surfaces are still a little flat or lumpy.

But it can evolve over time, if you have any suggestions/constructive criticisms I'd love to hear them. Right now I am going to tweak the animations some. Personally I think the character handling in game could use some work too, feels a bit like you're driving a twitchy boat at the moment. Where would I look for those settings?

I'd like to add in some more directional movements and jump/landing variations, and to relax the existing idles. Anything other animations you'd like to see while I'm at it?

p0ss: really nice stuff, but I think we should move it to a new post? Like, p0ss' LoS models and art or something

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:p0ss: really nice stuff, but I think we should move it to a new post? Like, p0ss' LoS models and art or something

Done.

Looking good, p0ss. The head and the normal map in particular are big improvements. If you can make it work with the shape keys so that character customization works decently with it, this is definitely something we'd like to use.

Plenty of things to improve still, but it is definitly a big improvement over the old one But I can tell that you spend a lot of time on the boobs

How limited are you by the rig? I guess it has to be the same to avoid re-doing the animations etc?

For anime meshes, did you have a close look at this: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/char ... hito-nami/ ?

Edit: Wires and more frontal shots make it easier to give suggestions how to improve it btw.

You're right, there is more to be done.

After speaking with nekotaku, and playing with the shapekeys, I am going to redo this model completely.

Firstly, and most importantly, it will now not be the female model, it will be gender neutral. I am redoing all the shapekeys, so there will be primary characteristic sliders, like waist width and chest depth, and sexual characteristics, like boob settings and "package" size. This will allow the player to choose any combination of body proportions and characteristics, without being defined by false gender dichotomy. Yes, that means we will have shemales and androgynous characters, in addition to females, males and everything in between, all on the one rig and the one mesh.

Secondly, to compliment the first point, I have already begun redoing the animations to make them gender neutral, so taking the sway out of the walk and toning down the limp wrists. I'm also using this as an opportunity to alter a few animations that were bugging me, the running animation no longer looks like gliding, and the jumping animation now makes anatomical sense.

Thirdly, I am making armor/clothes for the new model, if done right, and given the underlying gender neutrality, we should be able to have all items of clothing wearable by both males and females, and merely alter their appearance based on the player's shapekey settings.

Since you wanted to see the underlying topology, here is a quick example.

So basically the same topology as the original model, but with lines cleaned up and with more vertices around joints and deformation points, this was not finished, and will change a lot as I make it gender neutral and more customisably deformable. At this point it is rendering approximately half the number of polys in-game a the old model, while having %20 more vertices.

Hmm, while I appaud the efforts of LoS to introduce more controversial topics into gaming (something we as FOSS developers luckily have the freedom to do), I have my doubts that your approach to gender neutral characters will work very well.
It sounds good in theory (and I think "Make-human" also tried it...), but I can practically guarantee you that it will result in bland looking and boringly animated characters.

Games (as an art-form) require a little over the top stylization of shapes and animations, especially in a game like LoS.

Besides that... transgender characters will hardly be noticable with clothing unless you stylize their features a lot... which again will be very hard to achive with a generic system like you are proposing.

How much stylization comes from mesh though? Isn't clothing and textures the main differenciator? Also, things like wings, tails, horns etc can also be added on..

Also, having 1 base model saves /so/ much work. Having to make 7 different pairs of clothing, for each race and each race's gender is just completely impractical for an open source game. Even Oblivion resorted to using a base model.

Powerful sliders allow for easier procedural content generation, which also reduces the workload..

Personally, I'm pretty set on it being a good idea. Nekotaku's fine with it as well, and I think it could bring in a lot of attention from places like Dev.Art

Sure you can try it... maybe there is a way to also procedurally chance the animations alongside with the meshes? That would at least lessen the "same model used all the time" (as in Oblivion) look a bit.

Well, it's not about trying, it's already implemented :P A couple of releases ago, actually. Darn we must be bat at publicity..

And the only procedural changes in animations are speed atm, would be tricky to change it in other ways, but it's a good idea to look into it.

perhaps you should ask oblivion modders what they think of they Idea. I sure wouldn't waste my time tring to make clothes for a he/she model.

This:
http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html

Might give you some hints how to modify the animations for a smooth transition between male and female.

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:And the only procedural changes in animations are speed atm, would be tricky to change it in other ways, but it's a good idea to look into it.

It wouldn't be that difficult actually. You could have a gender neutral animation set and two other animation sets, masculine and feminine, that could be blended with it. Basically, the only thing stopping us from doing it right now is that we don't have the animations and creating them is a lot of work.

There's also room for further advances that wouldn't be that hard to implement either. Scripts can also override the transformations of pose bones, but that could be extended so that they could set the rest transformations as well. That'd allow you to adjust the armature based on body proportions and the animation weights used.

Julius {l Wrote}:This:
http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLwalker.html

Might give you some hints how to modify the animations for a smooth transition between male and female.

Thanks, this could come in handy as a reference.

Carver413 {l Wrote}:perhaps you should ask oblivion modders what they think of they Idea. I sure wouldn't waste my time tring to make clothes for a he/she model.

They're already sort of doing this in Skyrim with the body weight slider. Adding more sliders or widening the range seems to be a constantly reoccurring request so I wouldn't say that people don't want mesh morphing. Our system is basically the same with what Skyrim does, just with many more sliders. The Saints Row game series has an even more similar character creation system to ours, and it works well in my opinion.

I'd also say that the majority of Oblivion modders wouldn't bother with the other gender regardless of how the system works. You could take this route in LoS by saying in the itemspec that the item works with certain slider settings only. However, if you convert clothes for another body mesh in Oblivion by moving vertices to match its proportions, you're effectively creating the morph targets that LoS uses. It doesn't feel like a whole lot of effort to me at least, and in a way it's less taxing mentally than specifically making a male version.

If you had separate male and female meshes with their own morph sliders, you could only have half as many sliders until you'd get to the point that a fully customizable equipment mesh would be more work to create that way than with a universal player mesh. When you start thinking in terms of athletic women and feminine males, you soon get to the point that there'll only be two morph targets that models don't share.