Player Model

[Cheeseness]

We need a rigged and textured player model suitable for sitting in a golf cart and taking a swing.

So far in IRC, we've discussed the idea of making it a caricature of Patrick, and Taekon has done a couple of bits of concept art.

Placeholders are welcome

[ErikBehar]

Can we get a female concept ? I suggest doing DF Anna ! Any other DF employee heads would be great too = ]

[ErikBehar]

also im taking a first low poly pass at this

[ErikBehar]

Progress so far:

[ErikBehar]

Hair Progress

[Cheeseness]

Ah! This is looking fantastic! :D

The only feedback I can offer is that you might need some extra verts at the knees, elbows and fingers to make nice bent poses a bit easier.

[Taekon]

Female model concept I attempted to base off Anna:

I'm thinking the modelers could use Patrick's as a base, just change the head shape, pull the hair out longer and make some clothing changes. Should be a quick checklist item!

Also, to echo some male model suggestions I said in the chat: I think the jaw lines could be raised up a bit; the chin could be squarer and wider; the fingers a bit chubbier and maybe make the legs longer? I'm unsure about that last one but it might work.

EDIT: forgot to mention: some of us in the chat have been discussing about using the argyle sweaters as an indicator for what colour/team a player is on.

[Taekon]

Here's the quick colour ref. Pulled the colours directly out of Bad Golf 1 pitch video. I'm unsure which one would be easier to see in-game so I did two with very slight alterations.

[Taekon]

I re-worked Anna's design because I wasn't happy with the last one. The clothing alterations are still the same, however.

[Cheeseness]

Oh nice. That looks a bit more like her!

[ChrAfonso]

I'm working on a Brad model (just the head for the time being), based on this concept: When its in a useable state, I'll try to import the existing Patrick body model and swap the head. Any comments on pitfalls in this process? Would be great if the animation rig continues to work (I haven't looked at the model yet).

[ChrAfonso]

It's not quite finished yet, but it's on its way :D

[The-Mad-Pirate]

Any chance of adding a Tim's inspired character ?

[Cheeseness]

Any chance of adding a Tim's inspired character ?

By the looks of things, we'll probably end up making a bunch of DF characters. We want to avoid getting bogged down in that at this stage though.

[Taekon]

Do you guys think we should have the heads in an at least similar style? I don't mind if Xexano wants to design the rest of the heads so they don't look out of place.

[The-Mad-Pirate]

That's an amazing idea , that way all models will be consistent. I admit it , actually didn't thougth player model were modular , althougth doing them in a modular fashion will require some extra effort in terms of rigging and skinning.

[ChrAfonso]

I added a slightly improved version into the test scene and put up a pull request. Do you think the designs look too different? I tried to match the style of the Patrick and Anna designs (button eyes etc.) while accomodating the mandatory ":D". I like those designs, when the facial features of the concept art are applied to the textures I believe they will look great in the game :)

[Cheeseness]

Nice work, @ChrAfonso!

Do you guys think we should have the heads in an at least similar style?

I think that longer term, this is something we'll go for, and later on we may want to come back and rework some of our bits and pieces for consistency as part of a polish pass, but for the moment, some dissonance isn't a bad thing, especially if it helps more people feel comfortable contributing.

[Taekon]

Thanks for the replies guys! I'll continue with my stabs then ;)

Colour test 1:

Tried doing actual argyle but it made Patrick look like a schoolkid... Before I continue though, which one do you guys like better: white or black?

[ErikBehar]

Somewhat fixed Brad head and comparison

[Taekon]

Colour test 2:

4 typical team colours, mind the leftover red artifacts, I'm not very good at Photoshop :(... On a bright and vivid coloured field I think black would work better?

[Cheeseness]

So much awesome, guys :D

I'm leaning towards the white variants, which won't be quite so harsh when rendered in-game with shadows/shading.

[ChrAfonso]

Great work, Erik! How difficult was it to apply the different head to the body? i.e., would it work if I improve upon the head by itself and push up newer iterations for you to replace the current one? I'd like to do it myself, but couldn't get the Patrick fbx into Blender in any converted format (dae, obj), only the collar showed up... If we go the "unibody with replaceable heads" route, I'd imagine just parenting the new head fbx to the "headless" body prefab/object would work?

Regarding the comparison shot: whoa, put side by side like that (inside the same engine) the really look more different stylistically than I thought... have to turn down that Simpsons skin color :D I think I'll try to do an updated design that matches the Mii-like dimensions more closely.

[Taekon]

@ChrAfonso Imo instead of re-designing Brad's, tweaking Patrick's head and hair so it's a little bit smaller and thinner should work (and the nose too!). I'll whip up a really quick edit of that comparison picture and see if this is possible. I think it's just the placeholder texture details that's pushing through.

Also, Erik gave me Patrick's model in .obj to try painting textures in PS. I couldn't but maybe the files would be of use? http://www.inversethought.com/Eriks/temp/parts.zip

[Taekon]

Here we go! (did this in Photoshop)

What I did to Patrick:

• Moved the nose up a little bit.
• Added a little shaved beard.
• Made his eyes and mouth smaller.
• Made his head smaller.(overdid this I think)
• Made his hair smaller and shorter.
• Extended the hair to cover a tiny bit more of the forehead.

What do you think?

P.S: awesome work @ErikBehar ! The sweet body model should allow us to make all of the heads!

[ChrAfonso]

This looks great! I still think I should do some slight improvements to Brad to make him more in line with Patrick, I think that just requires some details that improve it anyway:

• Make the head a bit more round, less pill-shaped, which is an artifact of the box-modelling
• Change the skin color, obviously, this is not Brad Simpson ;)
• Improve the mouth shape, I think it looked better in the first screenshot (before I pulled out the teeth into a seperate mesh)
• Perhaps extrude the hair, too, something about it doesn't look right.

One other thing that's on my mind is, do we want to add some facial animation later? Happy/angry expression, open/closed mouth... I guess that would be easiest to do with texture animation/swapping, but would require modelling Brad without excessive mouth geometry.

[Cheeseness]

We could do Brad's :D as a texture without it looking awful (as an option).

You know, I kinda prefer the giant head a little bit. What do you guys think?

@ChrAfonso Yeah, I think gaving Brad's hair as geometry would help a bit. Maybe even the beard as well.

I'd like for s to aim to do facial animation eventually, but I reckon now's not the time to get stuck doing that.

[ghost]

@Cheeseness It could be a little smaller... Brad still has to fit in the cart, lol

I like the edited Patrick, the head was a little too big to begin with. Now, he looks more stylized than cartoon.

@Taekon If you feel like Photoshopping it, Brad's head could shrink a little to put him on par with Patrick and his neck should be shorter

Great work in this issue!

[ChrAfonso]

Regarding animations, I think I will experiment a bit with various methods. I got a simple test for manipulating blend shapes via script working, which would be a good way to do face animations. I don't know yet how they can be integrated/synchronized with full-body rig animations (other than starting both at the same time), perhaps somebody with more animating experience can pitch in? I recall that there's something with custom drivers in Blender that can be used to apply special bone positions to shape keys, so rig transforms and shape blending can be integrated into one contained animation. Sorry for rambling, if this is painfully obvious to anyone familiar with animating, just wanted to share my thoughts on next steps, so they can be shot down soon if they're rubbish :D

[Taekon]

Here's my second overlay edit:

Brad:

• Enlarged Brad's head and gave him more hair.
• Enlarged Brad's eyes and gave him eyebrows.
• Changed his skin colour to be somewhat similar to Patrick's (did this poorly but you can see the gist of it).
• Made his neck shorter.

Patrick:

• Made his hair smaller and gave it a some curves/waves.
• Moved his nose up and made it a little bit longer.
• Redid his eyes, mouths, and a little shaved beard (all of these will be textures).

This time around I didn't change Patrick's head size at all, but made Brad's size similar in regards to @Cheeseness' comment :D! I actually do like the big heads and prefer this one to my first edit.

[ChrAfonso]

I updated the Brad head, and did two face poses: (sorry for the opaque glasses, they're transparent in Unity) Somehow, the BlendShapes don't show up in Unity, I will look into that tomorrow... Your drawing looks great, Taekon :) PErhaps I can take a few cues from that look still, the eyebrows look better than mine...

[Cheeseness]

@Taekon That's great! Looking more and more bradlike :D

@ChrAfonso Nice progress so far. It'd be neat if we could use the same rig/animations for all heads to make less animating work for additional heads in the future.

[ChrAfonso]

@Cheeseness I agree. Quick thought, without having tested it yet: If we can "hotplug" new head models into the character as a child object called "Head", and have some predefined names for BlendShapes/Animations (e.g. "neutral", "happy", "angry"), they could be triggered generically by a Unity script. If the head gets attached to a neck node, perhaps that can be animated for turns/looking up/down, so it propagates to all heads attached to it.

[Cheeseness]

@ChrAfonso Let's move facial animation stuff off to #59

[Taekon]

Model texture progress!

Finally got the 3D thing in Photoshop to work. I'm learning to do the whole texture thing but I'm sure I"ll get the hang of it soon enough. Colours are to be changed as lighting on the model made them not as distinguishable as I would have liked.

[Cheeseness]

@Taekon That's a good point. In-game lighting is something we're going to need to start to address soon too.

[ErikBehar]

@Taekon = ] Nice looking texture

[ErikBehar]

I'm working on the skinning of the model with the added loops and brad head, I can post wip file if people needed.

@Cheeseness you could probably merge that pull request in the art repo ; )

[Taekon]

@ErikBehar Thanks! Still need to get some actual texture aka wool and fabric to slap on top of it. Hope this isn't going to interfere with the skinning. Also, since the heads are going to be interchangeable, could you separate Patrick's head with the hair on top as a separate .obj for me?

[Cheeseness]

@Taekon I'd be keen to see in-game examples of this without fabric textures. I've got a hunch that it'd still look pretty neat ^_^

[ChrAfonso]

@ErikBehar If it's ok that I try to add some face animations to Patrick, too, could I also get the head .obj? :)

[Taekon]

I've finished the base textures! Not sure how to do the shoes though, so maybe someone could chime in on that. Also, I'd love some feedback/suggestions before I move onto the other colours.

[ChrAfonso]

Looks good to me :) I took your Patrick face from the comparison pic above and applied it to the model:

There's definitely room for improvement (I messed up the normal mouth shape again :P)...

[ErikBehar]

maybe we should add more loops/geo to the face, if we are adding blendshapes

[Taekon]

Here's a .png of a mask I hope

[Cheeseness]

Looking good, people!

I'm with @ErikBehar. There's definitely scope to upres the faces a bit.

[JenniBee]

Somebody on the forum suggested that we make Tim our fourth playable character, so I made this concept, trying to keep as close to Taekon's style as I could:

[Cheeseness]

Cheers, @JenniBee!

I'm going to close this issue pretty soon and open a new one for additional player models (something I should have done as soon as Brad related stuff started happening :D ).

[DMann3D]

Hey, I mentioned in the DF forum, but I'd love to help out with the character art if you need it. Even just crits/feedback/guidance if needed, but I'm kind of itching to model some characters. Can I start on Tim's character?

[Taekon]

@DMann3D Hello and welcome! Atm we're hoping to get interchangeable heads into the games so a buncha head models would be super appreciated! I also have Anna's posted up there (and here for your convenience) if you'd like to get started:

Also @JenniBee, just echoing what I suggested in the chat: Looks great :D! I think it'd be real convenient for the modelers if you could draw Tim's head in multiple directions (also perhaps try a smaller-sized brush, details are good!). You don't have to include the body since we're only using one at the moment.

[DMann3D]

Awesome, I'll get started ASAP. Quick question: what's the poly limit? Obviously nothing Last of Us levels, but for final output, are we working towards tablets, PCs, phones...? This'll help me know how much detail to put into the models.

Thanks!