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Chohole
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This discussion was created from comments split from: Introduce Yourself, Hello, my name is......
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Hi Guys,
My name is Ray Bornert and I am the creator of Faracraft™.
http://farcraft.com
I love Daz3d, the models are amazing!
http://farcraft.com/screenshots/1436673835.jpg
My main goal here on Daz is to find high qualilty models where each limb is a ("separate object").
The reason for this is because the FC engine treats each limb as a unique object so that we can deliver a gaming system where the players can swap out whole limbs. In other words, the players can have a torso that has lizard skin, a right thigh with dragon scale, a left thigh with titanium plate, a right hand of steel and a left hand of silver, etc. You get the idea. In other words, we want limbs (including heads) to be treated like gear.
So I am looking for help from those that know how to make models with these 15 separate parts:
head, torso, hips, larm, rarm, lwrist, rwrist, lhand, rhand, lleg, rleg, lshin, rshin, lfoot, rfoot
See the attached SS for a programmer hacked examle of a solid model that has been cut up into these pieces.
Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.
Riitoken
Split into it's own thread and moved to the Commons.
Please remember that anything from the Daz 3D store will require a Game Developers License if it is to be used in a game.
Chohole is correct. You'll need a Game Dev license, and after that you just need to export the figure to a favored modeler and go to town.
I suppose it would really depend on what you're actually looking for-- Genesis 3's setup is most useful to you, but if you need custom sculpting for various characters, then you'll need a clear idea of what exactly it is you want them to look like, how many you need, and what your finances will support.
Although I'm interested in why your engine is coded that way. I should think it would be a nightmare to animate, and the seams look pretty poor. It would save on the animator's hair and sanity meters if the engine used material zones to do what you suggest, and then change the textures rather than the mesh. This has the added benefit of giving your texture artist a bit of a challenge without driving them to drink trying to skin-match across fifteen different objects.
Re-working the material zones isn't hard with the right software, which no doubt the modeler you finally get to do this would ask for if they don't already have it (some of us are making do with UVMapper Classic, which isn't particularly suited to that particular task). Cutting up a physical model isn't hard, but the alterations might take a bit, especially since that would break the mapping again.
If you have questions, feel free to send me a sitemail and I'll see what I can do about providing you some more insight, both from a modeling and game design viewpoint.
Hi Dark,
Roger that in the gamedev license. I had assumed that as a given.
"export the figure and go to town."
I am a software engineer so I am looking for professional help from a pro Daz modeler to create the first template instance of the 15 standard humanoid parts for testing purposes. The idea is pretty simple, once we can get the first set of human male limbs built correctly then skinning them is a piece of cake. So if those parts were in the store right this moment I would have probably already purchased them.
"custom sculpting"
The FC engine follows a Mattel toy action figure paradigm. So picture a GI-Joe style human male with the 15 standard parts. The engine itself knows what a left-foot (lfoot) is and it knows how and where to put that into the avatar class; the engine doesn't care ("what") the lfoot looks like; it could be a bare-foot or a boot or a spiked heel. or a goat hoof. So the initial sculpting needed is just the near bare skin body parts. Each part just needs to be a static mesh aligned a certain way.
"coded that way"
The FC engine is coded this way to deliver action figurine like avatars with a massive catalog of interchangable body parts according to what the player wants. Note that this isn't just a skin only kind of thing given that a bare skin male foot has a different mesh than a GI-Joe combat boot. In addition to this, the FC engine has it's own bone oriented animation system that is 100% independent from how the model is drawn be it mesh or voxel or other. In other words, as long as the right shin is the correct size and position inside it's cubic bounding box then the animations just work.
"animations"
The FC animations exist entirely in simple text files which are basically just the numbers to describe the camera postions of the limbs. Put it all together and you get a timed animation. It is very easy to animate a pure bones system. We have our own animation tool for the animators and we already have a basic set of animations files that look like this:
http://farcraft.com/farcraft/anim/i.anim.txt
So we are ready to go, we just need a starter set of 15 individual limb models.
"seams"
You are correct that the seams will not be poly perfect, but they don't need to be. They only just need to be good enough and that is solved with simple overlap. In other words, the elbow joint is where the wrist limb overlaps the arm limb so if both ends of each model are slightly spherical then it just works. In this system, it is very important that each limb be a completely unique model entirely separate from any limb to which it is attached. It is a pure bones system in every way.
Bottom line: I need a Daz3D body part store where I can buy entire limb sets for use in Farcraft™
We are potentially going to need about 10k different body parts.
Thank you for your help,
Riitoken
You don't really need a modeler to do this for you. Just open Daz, load the figure, hide everything but the part you want, and export as OBJ making sure to check "Ignore Invisible Nodes". Do that for each separate bit you need.
If they match up with the predetermined sizes, that would be the easiest way.
If your'e capable of skinning them, then all you need to do is decide what figure(s) you want cut up and the bits remodeled to the precise shapes you need.
As for questioning your design choices, please accept my apologies. I've seen too many people think they've got it under control and are instead making things more complicated than they need to.
I sent you a PM with some more information.
The way her needs this broken up doesn't lend itself to that approach, unfortunately. Part of what he needs is wrist segments, and you can't make those using the regular export conventions. You'd still have to cut the model. Also, unless you're planning on making things completely seamless (which action figure styling is decidedly not), you'd want to close up the ends of each piece, and that will require a modeler.
Your best option is to hire a pro modeller to create the 15 body parts from scratch, on a "work for hire" basis. That way you own the content, and can use it in your game in prepetuity. If planned properly, some profile variety could be achieved using morphs. But this all costs money.