How to Create a 3D Real-Time Character

Hi there, a while ago I started making a tutorial on doing 3D toons for wintermute for the community. As i was doing it the and project grew I decided to try and make a definitive guide about the creation and utilising of a 3D character resource. I was going to post the entire thing in one go but due to time constraints, with work and my own project, I have been convinced to release each section as I it is completed.

I hope that these video tutorials may be useful to others and is my way of trying to thank Mnemonic for the crazy amounts of time he puts into making this free engine for hobby game developers, and commercial developers alike.

1.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 34.4 Meg
2.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 122.6 Meg
3.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 121.68 Meg

This tutorial talks about how to prepare your design documents for use in your 3D app of choice as Design Plates. (images used to model off).

• How to ensure your design is Symmetrical to aid in Symmetrical Modelling
• How to ensure your front / side views are aligned to each other.
• How to ensure you Symmetrical Drawing aligns to your Zero World space in your 3D application

1.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 34.4 Meg

This tutorial will discuss the modelling process to build your model off your design plates. Rather than simply record my making of a model, I decided to try and discuss conceptual ideas of model creation. With luck i hope to have introduced novice modellers to procedures and techniques that will enable you to build a 3D model that is easy to set up for animation and game content.

This tutorial will discuss

• Symmetrical Modelling
  • To speed up the modelling process
  • Aid in the easy creation of a UV Layout
• Choice of Polygons
  • Do i use Tris or Quads, or polygons with more than 4 sides?
• Joints Setups
  • How to make a joint that will be easy to skin and produce decent deformation
• Use of the Model T-Pose
  • A discussion of what pose to model your toon in to aid skinning and produce decent deformation
• Easy way to build mouths and eye blink topology

NOTE:- This tutorial is a little long due to modeling being a large topic. Still I feel I have included some good information here, even though I got real board towards the end and the ending is a little rushed. I may need to redo the end of this but I will wait to see comments (if anyone watches it lol)

2.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 122.6 Meg

This tutorial is about how to do a more advanced UV layout to achieve two things. 1) create a uvlayout that can be easily read and thus painted on in a 2D packadge, and 2) Arrangment of UV layout so you use the space of your bitmap to full effect.

Download:- 3.of.8_3DtoonWME_Tut.rar - 121.68Meg

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These files are stored at filefront, a free file hosting site that gives you unlimited storage space and up to a gigabyte for each individual file. Due to this being a free service the servers are sometimes lagged out. When you click on the download link, it should automatically take you to the downloads page at filefront. If the file dose not download immediately then simply do not touch your browser, just leave it open on the download page and it should start in a short amount of time.

If filefront gives you a error message, just leave the window open, if you read the entire error message it will also say to leave the page open and it should automatically resend the download request, and soon start to download.

These video files are built using the XviD codec. (A free open source video codec) If you try to watch the videos and only get sound and no picture then you will need to download and install the XviD binnary.

http://nic.dnsalias.com/xvid.html

I used Xvid as I am very familiar with this codec form other projects i have worked on and by using it I am able to reduce the file size of the final video and still retain a acceptable level of quality. If to many people are finding trouble seeing these videos I will add to this post the same files encoded in a different format, though the final file sizes may be larger. I will most probably use OGG as almost all wme developers will be using his video codec in there games.

The videos are compressed even more using a archiving program similar to winzip. Winrar is a very good archiver and has shaved off 10-20 or so meg from each file at least. If you do not have the winrar program installed you will need to install it to unrar the AVI file from the rar container.

http://www.rarlab.com/

Well that is it I will update this page as needed and I hope you guys like it. I would appreciate any comments and constructive criticism.

Be excellent to each other and Party on Dudes
–Jyujinkai