The Key, Expanded

So here it is then. My UV Layout for this character. Everything is boxed out in it's own area. Each character of this type from now on will have the same layout.

Notice how the greater proportion of lines flow horizontal and vertical? During the modelling stage I was careful to create natural seams and contours as you might find in the clothing I'm trying to represent. Look at the character grab and notice the way the check pattern is seamless for each part, now imagine just how easy it's going to be to create a pattern weave, print or words!

Let's Start... At point not quite at the beginning...

...but not terribly far away.

There are a plethora (...oh El Guapo!) of tutes out there on character modeling and modeling in general so I won't go into the build of this character.

There's no Eyeballs!

I'm aiming for an all-up vert count of around 2500 fully kitted and ready to rock. "Bah, next gen characters are weighing in at 16thou+!" I hear you say, true but what I'm laying down here is designed to be scalable up or down. I haven't built eyes for this dude nor any facial features for that matter. At this point I'm considering using an animated texture for facial expressions so I've created a smooth surface and profile... Old school, Yeah.

The Key

I hate UV mapping, there I said it, you hate it too though! Thing is with characters right, they're mostly the same physical form, why not allocate body parts their own space on the UV map, and maintain this layout for every character that you create (within reason). For every character you create you will have a fresh data set that can be combined with parts from other characters to generate yet more characters, viola, your custom character tool or even totally unique NPC's.

Introduction

Hello all and welcome to my project.

I'm attempting with this post to outline some of my thoughts in regard to establishing and maintaining a Data driven (ie art) character pipeline that can be used to generate a multiple of unique characters faster and less painfully than with traditional techniques that will also support end user customizing through a Game UI or similar (Costume kits).

To this end I'll be working from the concept on the right, which was kindly drawn up for me by a former work colleague Jason Ng.

About me.

I started in the games industry in 2001 when I landed my first job at Sony Computer Entertainments' London Game studio. My first job was building unique player likenesses for "This is Football 2003" I've worked on action, driving, RPG/MMO and Flight Sim's and until recently I was building a custom avatar tool for a Web based social networking application. Which leads me to this: