Okay, so let me be honest: I’m a coder, not a 3D Modeler or Animator. Still to do experiments I need to have a character who can help me do any kind of stuff. Basically I need a test dummy.
What do you need to do to create a character? Good question, it has a list of small steps as an answer:
- Create the model itself
- Create the UV map for it (for texturing)
- Paint the texture
- Add Bones, and assign to the model
- Adjust how the bones are deforming their part of the model (Weight Painting)
- Create the animations using the bones
From the above I barely had any experience so far but hey: life is about learning a lot isn’t it? So for a start I created a simple model, created the UV map, and started to paint the texture map. It’s kinda fun, the result looked like something I was very satisfied with:
Basically, I had my little astronaut the way I wanted and I couldn’t be happier, I think I finished in 2 days until this point. The next day however when I started to create the armature and move around the hands, legs etc. I noticed that well… the guy wasn’t really well-planned, the legs are awful, everything was deformed in a way like I wanted to make fun of the human body. That wasn’t the result I was looking for.
So I started over: new model, but changed the workflow, I was shooting for an armature with weight painting and animation first, let’s do the “boring” drawing later. After some days – a week – I have what I wanted an animated character walks and runs in one of my test scenes in Unity. Sure it’s not perfect but I wasn’t expecting a perfect result:
the new (with an additional light on the top) on the left
After a bit of a thinking I named him Bob. So please help me welcome Bob in the virtual space: