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Fey Model

6 years ago709 words

I made a model yesterday for the player character of the game I described in ∞ the previous post ∞!



It only took a few hours, and I'd say it's a huge improvement over the blocky, low-poly placeholder models that I included in the prototype. I think this better shows the improvements in my 3D modelling abilities, and I'm relatively happy with how it turned out (though I'll likely continue tweaking it as I go along). I think she looks like the sort of person you wouldn't be surprised to learn had committed suicide, probably??



While trying to improve my 3D modelling skills over the past few weeks, I benefitted a lot from seeing people post their own 3D models, especially if the wireframe was visible so I could see exactly how the model was constructed. So I'm posting these images here, in the off-chance that some internet traveller might stumble upon them one day and they might be of use to them. Or maybe it's just interesting to see a bit of the technical stuff that goes into making such things!

It's not the best model ever - the 'edge flow' of the topology is far from optimal, for those who know what that means - but it's okay for what it needs to be, I think.



It was quite annoying, while searching for material that'd help me develop my skills, how I repeatedly came across overly complex models or rigs that seemed to be for snazzy animated films and such, or extremely rudimentary rigs that didn't allow for things like basic facial animation. A lot of things I read suggested using something called 'shape keys' to get the face to emote, which is where you essentially model each expression individually rather than relying on the movement of bones (in case you don't know, 3D models use 'bones' - the grey blocky things in the leftmost image up there - for animation), and I did indeed use shape keys in the previous 3D thing that I made to create the expressions. It had limitations, though, which I won't bother to go into, and I wanted to use a rig for the face instead. I came up with one which seems adequate for my needs, which allows me to add lovely, subtle, empathy-eliciting emotions to her face, like so:



Beautiful. I am wiping a tear from my eye.

Or here are some less stupid ones:



They're achieved using a facial rig that looks like this:



It's definitely not Professional Animator quality, but I'm quite proud of it because it does exactly what I need it to do, and should make adding varied expressions quite easy. I tried to use the absolute bare minimum number of bones that I could get away with - I've always been quite frugal about digital resources like that - so I'm happy that it has less than twenty in the face. It's hardly going to allow me to do subtle, nuanced expressions, or ostentatious, cartoony ones, but I don't need to for this project, so that's fine.

A lot of games seem to completely neglect facial expressions on characters, I've noticed (unless they're extreme things like violent rage), but I've used them since my earliest work because I feel they're so important for storytelling and for having the characters actually feel like people. It's interesting comparing these to the portraits in MARDEK (or what I can remember of them; I can't be bothered to find a screenshot), and thinking that while I've certainly come a long way, they're still just iterations of the same essential thing.

Anyway, I'm enjoying working on this game, so I might continue to post about it as I go along! Well, until the Easter holidays end and I get consumed by university commitments again... sigh. At least there's not much longer left before I graduate. Then I'll have to have brain surgery, and I've no idea what to do with my life after that... But for now, it's just easier to focus on this, so I will.