Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Some other animation issues to consider: When designing clothing at or near joints, think
about how these areas will behave when the joint bends. Loincloths, skirts, shoulder pads,
longsleeves,cuffs,andoverlappingarmorcancausesomeofthemostfrustratingproblems
when skinning your character (covered in
Chapter 11
)
, and often require additional control
bones not allowed in your joint budget.
Tip
Consult your technical director or lead animator about any design element
that looks troublesome or that might need substantial secondary animation
or many control bones. And do it before embarking on the modeling stage;
you may be saving yourself a lot of rework later on.
Summing Up the Limitations
So let's summarize the basic technical limits for our two characters.
This is quite a short list, and on a real project there will be other areas to consider. How
will facial animation be handled in the game—will it be joint driven or will you use blend
shapes (we will discuss this in
Chapter 13
)? What about extra texture effects like alpha,
specular,bump,ornormalmapping?WillGrae'swingsbejointordynamicsdriven?These
questions may look scary to the uninitiated, so for now we will concentrate on the basics.
Other technical considerations and concerns will be covered as we work through the topic,
building, texturing, and rigging our characters.
Luckily, Kila and Grae are the main characters, so we have been given generous polygon,
joint,andtexturelimits.Graeisquitelargeandalsohaswings,sohewillneedmorejoints,
polygons, and (possibly) texture space than Kila.
Preparation
Having done the research, we now have all the information we could possibly handle,
right?Nowdowestarttodraw?Nope,wemoveontothenextstage:preparation.Weneed
to gather reference material and compile a
style sheet.