Character Modelers

[cho102997]

Is anyone out there interested in/good at character modeling? We need a good one for our project.

[Aloys]

Those characters videos is the one (and only) obstacle to having a realRiven, but I have to say that recreating them in 3D will be quite a pain to do... (remember how Cyan ended doing them in realMyst and M5)
While it is possible to create some decent models and textures, animating those in a convincing fashion won't be easy. At least I don't know any character animator in our community.

[GPNMilano]

While it is possible to create some decent models and textures, animating those in a convincing fashion won't be easy. At least I don't know any character animator in our community.

*whistles innocently*

Even before Cyan made their bone rigging available, I had already created a custom avatar model with the texturing all done in order to try and get bone animation working in PyPRP. However, with the rigging of the avatar being released by Cyan I've been able to figure out about 75 percent of what they did to make the avatar prps. Now it's just a matter of trial and error of getting the other 25 percent. Skinning the avatar model to the skeleton (which I'm currently in the process of doing for mine) and then figuring out how to uv map the bones is the only problem I'm currently stuck on. But I'm pretty confident in that by the end of the summer, with the resources I currently have, (unless Cyan throws a curve ball and releases more avatar stuff) I could create a realistic avatar. It won't be playable of course until Cyan releases the source for the client engine (as the avatars are hard coded into the engine by their names). But once it's done I plan on sending it to Cyan to see if it would indeed work.

[diafero]

That sounds AWESOME, Chloe Any screenshots available?

[Lontahv]

A little off topic, but PyPRP2 now supports importing avatar bone systems (from either PoTS or MOUL).

[GPNMilano]

Sure Diafero:

What I did first was model the character over a period of a few months within Blender. Basing it on the basic figure of Cate that I imported from the MOUL files:


And Chloe in Blender:

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The texture for her was a mixture of Cate's, and Marie's, along with a unique face and hair style.

Then, once they opened up the character rigging I imported Chloe into 3ds Max:


Chloe In 3ds Max:

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And began the work of trying to get her to export. She exports fine, there's just problems with the uv mapping, as well as skinning her properly.

With the character rigging being open source I can also make new clothing items. But unfortunately they have the same problem as the avatar. I'm doing something wrong with the skinning, as the UV maps aren't being properly exported (they're actually being not exported at all according to the morph sequences and shared mesh info)

What I might do is try and hunt down the people that made the clothing and avatars for Cyan and talk to them about what I'm doing wrong in making both of these work.

HOWEVER. I have been able to make a bone animations for non playable character stuff. So I can make an urwin, or a non playable bahro without issue. The avatar's and their clothing however or not done the same way as these. So there's something I'm either not doing, or I'm doing wrong, when making the avatar stuff.

[AgeExplorer]

Wow those character models look simply amazing Chloe.

As for recreating Riven that will be quite an undertaking though looking at what has been accomplished so far I am very impressed.

[kaelisebonrai]

That.. is.. /awesome/ Chloe. =D

Very cool, indeed. =)

[GPNMilano]

Thanks Kaelis, AgeExplorer.

As I've stated before, the only problem with creating a brand spanking new avatar is the way the client handles them.

As near as I can figure, I think at least in CC, your avatar's state (what it looked like, what it was wearing etc) was all saved in the vault. When you use the change avatar function of the offlineKI it sends the new name to the vault. So if you chose DrWatson for example, the avatar's shape is stored in the vault as that. The vault then sends this information to the client to load this particular avatar.

The client contains the names of these avatars (In CC, Female, Male, DrWaston, RandMiller, Engberg, Kodama, Yeesha, YeeshaNoGlow, Zandi and Marie) The client takes the avatar shape information from the vault and loads the right PRP based via either it's aliasmodifier in CC, or the name of it's root dummy: the main scene object for the avatar, being a dummy object with the name of the avatar.

Since, if this is true, the client needs to recognize the name of the avatar shape to parse this information and load up the correct PRP, the name of the avatar HAS to be stored in the client to do so. Now since I can't stick ChloeRhodes into the client, the only other way for me to test this theory, and get a fan created avatar to work is to copy, as near as I possibly can, a CC avatar, only with my own design for the look of the avie. So my next step would be to change the name of the avatar to export it with the name of, say Marie, and see if the client will load up my avie then.

[diafero]

That looks promising

Yes, the avatar shape is just a string in the player's vault manager node. You can manually change it with VaultShop or VaultManager (in case of a Shard), then re-log, and get the new shape.

The current clothing, hair colour etc. are saved in form of some SDL nodes in the AvatarOutfitFolder (SDL types are appearanceOption, clothingItem and morphSequence). I could not yet find any Python dealing with this, so it seems a lot is hard-coded here, too.
The list of available clothes is just a list of clothingItem SDLs in the AvatarClosetFolder.