In game mesh customization..how?
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Ive been wondering, how professional 3d games handle dynamic manipulation of a 3d character or a mesh? what i meant is games like SIMS where you choose the "look" of your character
example you choose if its a female or male, the shape of the head, style of the hair, dress you wear, you can even choose the hieght and how fat or how thin the character is.. got the idea on what i meant?
any one can atleast enlighten me.. :)
For the most part, I think they just bolt together various models (helmets, pants) and change the textures and scale.
Works sort of like how Quake II and the like do "visible weapons".
Works sort of like how Quake II and the like do "visible weapons".
In something like the sims they use a number of techniques. First is they have things such as the hair or a hat as a seperate mesh to the underlying sim, which are positioned relative to the object (probably appended to the head bone in this case). the "height" and "weight" of the mesh can be changed with a simple vertex shader or by scaling the bones. Other details such as skin colour can be parameters to a pixel shader. Add all thses techniques together and you have a customisable character.
Morph targets are also used - sometimes in an initial "baking" step, and sometimes at render time, depending on the usage.
Texture blending is another applicable technique.
Texture blending is another applicable technique.
There`s a reason these games require huge art teams - all those characters and almost endless list of items/parts must be modelled, textured and tested inside the game which takes a lot of time.
From programming point of view, you just animate all body parts separately and make sure you join the touching parts (separate submeshes with same amount of vertices on both sides for example).
From programming point of view, you just animate all body parts separately and make sure you join the touching parts (separate submeshes with same amount of vertices on both sides for example).
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