I love you.
My team is
here, so I guess we're an enthusiast group that could use your assets.
1. I think that a stylized look is very popular these days, especially among indie teams. If I were you, I'd take a read over of
this paper. If you don't feel like it, the idea is to use textures that don't look repetitive, with low visual noise and low contrast and saturation for world textures.
I agree that asian style character models work great. I didn't like WoW models that much, since players didn't have much control and were forced to all look the same per race. In a game of all humans, this isn't really acceptable. Guild Wars had excellent looking characters, even though they too lacked control. I think it'd be great to build 2 (one male one female) base model, have a selection of head meshes (morph targets?), and maybe have a morph target support for fat to skinny.
Guild Wars Wiki has some
great pictures for character modeling.
I'd find the most use out of modern or
future assets, rather than fantasy assets. Also, maybe rather than making entire buildings, make walls and parts so devs can piece them together and have it be more unique. But honestly, character assets are really much more important to me and much more difficult to create.
It's all giving the character the impression of a scene, it doesn't need to be photorealistic!
2. For most assets (a crate, perhaps?), I give them up to 200 polys (okay, obviously that was a bad example, but you get the idea), and 256x256 textures. For characters, I have about 3000 polys and 256x256 to 1024x1024 textures. I don't use normal mapping for most objects (even characters), but if you are making characters, definitely use normal mapping and lower poly count. Normal mapping on crates is pushing it and pretty unnecessary, but if you did decide to do it, try using 64x64 or other very small textures.
Stick to alpha testing. Soft edges can be a pain to deal with, but any good graphics programmer can work around these problems.
I use .x format personally, but maybe providing people with .max or .mb would be a good idea. .dds is great too, .psd would probably be a pain for you.
As a general rule, the closer to the camera the object is, the larger the texture resolution. Character textures are extremely important. I'm sure you already know this, though.
3. No. This would be nice, but is really difficult. It would be cool to have one extra face bone to simulate speech, though. People can use angry eyebrows textures or pouty lip textures for moods.
4. I think that character assets (with animations, etc) would be, without a doubt, the most useful. I've blown hundreds of dollars on just basic character work and I'm still not satisfied!
If you were clever about it, you could (after gaining popularity and having the basics for free) get some decent cash off it - charge cash for extra MMORPG character model item packs that work perfectly for your character sets, etc. Of course, Creative Commons is always better :)
For character assets, go for quality! Well, for the characters themselves, that is. Remember - people are going to be staring at their characters all day.
For environment assets, go for quantity. Players don't pay much attention to props.
I wouldn't fuss with making terrain textures, if you were planning on it. There's CGTextures for that, as well as a million other tools and websites.
[Edited by - Akitsune on May 4, 2010 9:38:06 PM]
