Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Then, a blueprint must be created—an accurate image of frontal, side, back, and
sometimes top projection of the character or object. There is a standard pose for
charters; the arms are raised. So, the figure has a shape of the letter T; such a look is
known as the T-pose. But now, many modelers choose another version; when arms
are raised less, forming a 45-degree angle with the body (the pose can be called an
arrow pose), it helps prevent some potential problems with the shoulders after the
arms are down. The blueprint must be loaded into a 3D editor, thus becoming a tem-
plate to begin work with.
One of the ways to create a low poly model is to prepare a collection of cross sec-
tions of the object. Place them in the correct position and connect the appropriate
vertexes, creating edgesandfilling surfaces with faces at the end. Such anapproach
can help to control the edges manually, avoiding the situation where the editors turn
polygonal faces into tris automatically, thus creating ugly triangles. Alternatively, a
model can be sculptured in a high-poly mode, but then it should be optimized either
by using a special modifier controlling the number of faces inside objects (in Blender
it is called Decimate) or by doing it manually.
Note
If you prefer to work with shapes in vector editors such as Adobe Illustrator rather
than 3D editors, that is not a problem. Blender may import SVG-documents.
Thus, some shapes can be created in Illustrator, saved as an SVG-file, and im-
ported into a 3D scene. To resolve an issue with the anchor point, always place
shapes at the very center of the artboard in Illustrator. If you need only paths,
remove attributes from them before saving in SVG, for example, fill color so path
color and width. Don't forget to turn imported shapes into meshes if you need to.
After the geometry has been completed and is solid, the mesh should be textured.
For this operation, you need to learn such non-trivial procedures as UV mapping. It
is good to comprehend it with a low poly model. The process becomes very visual
and obvious because of the direct analogy with the paper craft. To add an element of
texture on a specific surface, you need to tell the 3D engine where to find that graph-
ic fragment in a texture document. For this job, the surface should be figuratively cut
out from the 3D object, such as a slice of paper cut by a knife, and then put on a tex-
ture as a template. That is the basic idea of 2D-mapping. A principle of projection of
3D geometry on a flat image, three coordinates, X, Y, and Z, are transferred on a flat
