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Realistic clothing?
Ok since my knowledge on 3D modeling is not great and there are people who know their 3D stuff in here, I ask you.
Is it possible to create custom clothing for characters?
Is it easy or hard? What about polycount?
I have seen some characters having their socks or gloves directly in their UV texture, but also some that have somewhat realistic clothing.
Please I must know.
Is it possible to create custom clothing for characters?
Is it easy or hard? What about polycount?
I have seen some characters having their socks or gloves directly in their UV texture, but also some that have somewhat realistic clothing.
Please I must know.
Comments
Yes, but there's currently no way to make the clothing mesh move in-game, so if you move the character's limbs around, the cloth won't follow, limiting you to one specific pose.
There's ways around this, but it would involve rigging the character in another program (Blender, most likely) and using that as a base to model the clothing, using some tricks that make the new mesh retain the rigging of the base mesh. Unfortunately, you'll need to export each pose separately as a static 3D model, and it will very much be tailored to that one specific character, so it's very inflexible and a hassle to set up, not to mention filesize- and polycount-intensive if you've got a bunch of poses you want to do. Oh, and as a final hurdle, you'll need to manually pose the character again in YL2 once you've got the clothing meshes in.
In short, doable, but costly in terms of time invested, especially if you need to learn your way around the software first.
Polycount's not too much of an issue (within reason, don't go making meshes with millions of them and not expect trouble), unless you're aiming to upload it to the in-app cloud system. I've not had a chance to test that in any way whatsoever yet though, so I can't tell you anything specific, but it seems like there's a limit to how much custom shit you can bolt onto the character before it gets cranky.
Still, that can be worked around by releasing the character for download on this forum through some file uploading service, and then maybe making a lite version for the cloud without so much stuff on it.
That's the best way to go currently if you want to have the "clothing" actually deform with the character's movements, but obviously, you're limited to more-or-less skintight designs with that.
Still, there's ways of adding some illusion of heft and wrinkling to them with custom normal maps, but that involves sculpting the 3D mesh, baking that sculpt onto the original mesh and then setting up some texture masks in YL2 so that it doesn't affect areas outside of the clothing. Quite a bit of extra work that requires a good bit of familiarity with 3D editing yet again, in other words.
I think I stay with texture clothing since making clothing is so long process with hoops and loops. And it may not even work out. Maybe I
can spice them up with imported 3D objects.
Do you or other people know any good sources to find objects for characters?
That's what most of us have been doing thus far, yours truly included. Just keep in mind that deformations can play unexpected tricks on you, so keep the meshes in areas with minimal deformation or be prepared to do a lot of tweaking.
Been making them from scratch myself for the sake of practice, so I wouldn't know. I'm sure you can get something out of a search engine with keywords like "free 3D models" though. Just keep in mind the limits on cloud uploads; I finally got around to doing some preliminary tests on that, and you've got a limit of 50,000 extra triangles on the whole character.
That's triangles, not polygons; whatever the polycount says, you can safely double to get a good estimate of the tricount. That's far more stringent than I was expecting and frankly, it's quite draconian. Something closer to the ballpark of 200,000 would work better, in my humble opinion. Part instancing gets you a bit more wiggle room, sure, but come on now, a machine that can run the base game should be able to handle a bit more than that.
I'm gonna have to do some serious optimization on the assets I've made thus far. Be prepared to do the same with any potential assets you might find online, or figure out how to make your own; it's not as hard as one might think. Hell, if I'd known it was this easy, I'd have gotten in on it years ago.
It's certainly enough to get away with a nude character plus a few props, but what about when we do get the skinned clothing? Those are going to require a majority of the budget, I'll wager, leaving little room for other fancy items like elaborate hairstyles.
I've had an idea for making a character in plate armour knockin' around my noggin for a while, as the lack of flexibility won't be too much of an issue with that, maybe I'll try it and see if I can squeeze a full-body suit plus a sword, shield and cloak into the 50.000 limit without going full retro low-poly on it.
By "do it correctly," I'm guessing you mean making a low-poly mesh, sculpting a copy of it further and then baking the high-poly details into a normal map for the low-poly mesh, correct? I know very low counts can be achieved with that, I've done it myself, but one must also consider that in this kind of game, you'll often be seeing things up close and personal in ways you wouldn't in others, so a higher level of fidelity is warranted. Guess I've been aiming a bit too high in my estimations of how much detail in the mesh you really need, though.
Sure. Spent yesterday agonizing over finding a way to decimate the numbers without having to redo everything from scratch with one of those meshes, in fact. Thankfully, I had enough foresight to save the mesh in question with non-destructive modifiers:
The high totals are due to the exported YL2 character mesh I used for scale reference. At first, I tried to run a ProOptimizer modifier and bake the MeshSmooth-ed...
...version's details onto the optimized version (hell, I even cranked the smoothing up to 5 iterations to get it real high-poly for extra detail). Unfortunately, the end results left much to be desired:
I tried a few more versions of this trick, to similar results, before I realized that I'm a dumbass; why the fuck am I trying to run ProOptimizer when I can just turn down the MeshSmooth? So I did just that:
Here's the topology of the original 2-iteration MeshSmooth applied, in case it's educational...
...and here's how it looks without the lines getting in the way. So, let's take it down a notch...
...funnily enough, changing the subdivision method to classic looked better in this case. Not too much of a visual downgrade and over half as light as the original. Here's the topology:
I did some preliminary tests, and it doesn't look like I really even need to bake a normal map, which is a relief, as I spent a couple of hours fighting with the UV unwrap on account of not remembering how I did it the first time around (just a simple cylinder projection, was a pain to clean up after the automated slice, though, let me tell ya) and I always seem to have trouble making the seams not look fucked on a normal map; I'm guessing the gamma correction settings on them are wonky, will need to trial-and-error it. Anyhow, the results:
Next, I'll have to deal with this mess:
I'll bet you're screaming internally at this. Those are the totals of the assets I made for Ameliée (and that's with all the references and unused meshes disabled and not contributing to it, at least they shouldn't be; sometimes the totals display hidden mesh data, too, so I can't be sure) and it doesn't even include the hair sculpt I did separately. Got rather carried away with all this, heh. All I can say in my defense is that I did this months ago and have learned a lot since then.
I was actually surprised myself when the game ran without all that much trouble with them all in a single scene, but then, I've got a fairly beefy machine, so I doubt the same holds true for others. Tricky part here is that some of those meshes I collapsed the modifiers on while I was working, so it's not going to be quite so easy to undo my mistakes this time around.
@odes It is good to know that the clothing is coming to YL2, even if it takes a long time to implement, but to know that Lustful Nun or Horny secretary may come to be is bringing a smile to my face.
@Brownmane I like your idea! I made plate armour skin for Charlotte with varying results so I cant wait to see your take on a knight in shining armour in 3d!
@thirteeenth Thank you for your advice for polycount when making 3D obj. I'm sure to keep it in mind!
It's not going to be easy but I guess i have do the 3D stuff like I did my YL1 skins...