Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 2.90
The completed basic model
The Morgue
Building up a collection of body parts is an efficient way of speeding up the modeling
process as you create more and more characters. After you have completed a character,
make sure the geometry is clean, optimized (more on this in
Chapter 5
), and ready to pass
into a game engine. Once it reaches this stage, you can divide it up into specific body
parts—hands, arms, feet, legs, torso, and head. Then store the parts in a special folder on
your hard drive—what I like to call The Morgue—ready to be used on other characters.
Thisstoragemethodisn'tjustforthehigh-endversionsofyourcharacters;itisjustashelp-
ful for holding other levels of detail. In the end, you will have, for example, a complete set
of hands at various resolutions. You can then import these into your scenes, adjust them as
needed, and attach them to your characters, potentially saving days, if not weeks of work.
Figure 2.91
displays many different resolutions I have generated for the same hand. This
file lies in my Morgue, ready for me to use on a new character. The models range from a
fully deformable hand with working fingers, to a standard mitten-type hand typically used
for lower-resolution models. Hands can take a lot of time to create—not only in their con-
struction but in the way they deform. So once you have a good hand model, keep it safe.
Even if you don't use it as-is on another character, you can refer back to its topology.
FIGURE 2.91
An example of various hand resolutions
