Tohster
December 4, 2014, 3:38am
5
For sure the technical requirements are there to make it happen and our team is currently looking into standardizing some of our player model designs to make it easier to build as many player models as we feel is needed so it’s the set up where things get a bit tricky and needs planning.
The first trick is to build a standard frame/rig that you can bind pose your assets off of and the rule is all things has to fit the rig. This way all of your animations will work with all of your characters with out the need for custom sets to fit a given character.
The advantage is the rig/skeleton needs to be imported only once into Unreal 4 so all of the goodies you want to attach, physics and sockets, only needs to be done once and the animator only needs to deal with the single asset to make it all work on everything.
Next trick is to build all things to fit your base and then conform the asset to fit the characters in you line up and us that as a morph target to create a single item fits all asset. Lets take boots for example as they are simple enough. Lets say your base character is Tom and you have two other characters **** and Harry and you make a set of really cool boots that fits Tom but is to big for **** and not small enough to fit Harry. With a one asset fits all approach the content crew would only need to rescale the boots to fit the other two, with out remodeling, and then is imported as a target for the base boots that fits Tom and the morph triggered to fit either of the two other characters.
The long way around to say workflow wise is to start with a single “does it all” character as to needs and then keep every thing else that comes after that on the same single channel pipeline and then think about how to make a given item fit.
For further research check out how Daz3d and Daz Studio works. They been using the bind pose technique for years using the same Genesis base frame.
Hi FrankieV. Thanks for the explanation! Just some clarification: by morph target you mean bind skin right? Could be just a difference in terminology, so I’m not very sure. To my understanding, 3DS Max has this ability to transfer skin weights of from one rigged mesh to another mesh that’s above it.