3d stage and character creation tutorial wip(scorpion and Jason)

[LM_MAVERIK]

New stuff: Jason voorhees
I chose to do his non/ undead look since I personally hated that jason. I prefered him much more during part 3, and 4 when he was a badass killing machine that ran after his victims and was tough to kill. not the one that is slow and monotonous and was virtually unstoppable.
The jason rigg is better then my scorpion one so I'll use him as an example as well. The rigging method is done using nurbs curves,ik and locators. Trust me it makes it 10 times more easier to animate.





I've been getting a number of requests as to how I go about creating a 3d character and stage for mugen, so I decided to share my methods and tools. (I actually create my 3d characters so if you cannot create your own I'll tell you how to get some or where to look)

The character I'll use in the tutorial is scorpion since my friends pretty much begged me to do him. I prefer sub-zero  but oh well 





Tutorial Briefing

The tutorials will be aimed at people who at least have some degree of 3d modelling and animating knowledge since I use maya and not all concepts apply to other 3d programs, BUT they can still be done in ALL I think...........

I will also go about preparing the 3d character or stage for mugen in steps
-Suitable size for a stage. (I'll hand out a basic obj file so you get the idea of how big a stage can be and work well with minimal sliding) in 237 frames
- rendering out frames and how to do it in the most quick and effective way. Rendering without antialiasing for layered stages/characters so there is no cleaning up needed in the sprites.
-how to code the stage or you can just use my coding template
-how to rigg the characters joints and what tools to use to help with animation
-how many frames to use per animation (well I'll give you an idea of what I use.)
-tips on animation


rigging and posing
 
weighting the most irritating task for many 

stage rendering


Once you get to the know the ropes and If your already skilled in modelling and animating I promise you now, you'll be able to produce a functional character for mugen in 2 hours. I personally can create a character in 2 hours or less fully functional and playable with good animation. (collision boxing is another story lol

So in a day or 2 your character could be near completion.

[Reiko26MKDT]

so my question to you is do you plan on or would you be willing to work on some 3d chars with someone that has a degree in 3d and animation b/c i have someone in mind that is creating a 3d Mortal kombat game and it look like the 2 of you would click and get alot done being that you 2 have degrees in the same field. I must say, scorpion looks good so far.

[Randomish]

He is making a 3d model game.

Its called Striders 2 Glory and there is even a board about it.

[Bleed]

Cool, I'm curious to see what you have for this tutorial.

[LM_MAVERIK]

so my question to you is do you plan on or would you be willing to work on some 3d chars with someone that has a degree in 3d and animation b/c i have someone in mind that is creating a 3d Mortal kombat game and it look like the 2 of you would click and get alot done being that you 2 have degrees in the same field. I must say, scorpion looks good so far.

I am working on a project at present but I also know nothing of this person or project? Has he got a thread or subforum?

[Reiko26MKDT]

bleed is his name, he just posted on your page and he has deviant art with 3d renders of his own work that he is doing for his own personal game.

[LM_MAVERIK]

bleed is his name, he just posted on your page and he has deviant art with 3d renders of his own work that he is doing for his own personal game.

Ok,but where are the threads or work I could see? What is the DA account name?

[Randomish]

http://elecbyte.com/forum/index.php?topic=55.0

[LM_MAVERIK]

http://elecbyte.com/forum/index.php?topic=55.0

Oh gabe. I am subsribed to him on youtube. so bleed is gabe? His work is very cool the scorpion he did looks ace 

[Randomish]

So is Scorpion going to be a guest character in S2G?

[Reiko26MKDT]

http://elecbyte.com/forum/index.php?topic=55.0

Oh gabe. I am subsribed to him on youtube. so bleed is gabe? His work is very cool the scorpion he did looks ace 

Check and Mate. Gabe=Bleed

[LM_MAVERIK]

So is Scorpion going to be a guest character in S2G?

no that wasn't really the plan, but it could work if we had some surprise characters I guess. Scorpion was meant to be the character I used for my tutorial.

http://elecbyte.com/forum/index.php?topic=55.0

Oh gabe. I am subsribed to him on youtube. so bleed is gabe? His work is very cool the scorpion he did looks ace 

Check and Mate. Gabe=Bleed

cool, his work is awesome from what I've seen so far

[Reiko26MKDT]

I'm interested to see how your stuff will turn out as well. Yeah gabe has been doing this stuff for a while. his 3d project is going to be epic once he finishes it. from what i see, your project seems to look like it will be a good one too.

[LM_MAVERIK]

I'm interested to see how your stuff will turn out as well. Yeah gabe has been doing this stuff for a while. his 3d project is going to be epic once he finishes it. from what i see, your project seems to look like it will be a good one too.

Yeah I believe it will. there are tons of advantages with 3d spriting/ consistency in sprites/bones to animate as opposed to drawing a new sprite again and if practiced enough you can make a functional character in hours, I'll explain that in my 3d character tutorial.

And thanks too.

[Mr. Green]

This is looking pretty good so far, I'll definitely read this tutorial when you release it,
your game looks too badass for words as well
keep it up man 

[Reiko26MKDT]

I'm interested to see how your stuff will turn out as well. Yeah gabe has been doing this stuff for a while. his 3d project is going to be epic once he finishes it. from what i see, your project seems to look like it will be a good one too.

Yeah I believe it will. there are tons of advantages with 3d spriting/ consistency in sprites/bones to animate as opposed to drawing a new sprite again and if practiced enough you can make a functional character in hours, I'll explain that in my 3d character tutorial.

And thanks too.

your welcome my friend. All i can offer is my support as i would love to see this game or project make its intro into the game arena.

[rednavi -RETIRED]

Please include a way to convert a modeled stage into sprites for a stage WITHOUT 3D movement aswell if possible, I'd like to be able to create the models on maya so I don't depend on spriters or pre-existant artwork but when it comes to the 3D movement for mugen im quite indifent to it (due to size file + ram needed = most likely lag in my fullgame). dont know if maya can pull such trick.

[Bleed]

I don't know how to do this in Maya, but in 3DsMax it's like this..

Model your prop, add your textures and lighting.
Set up a camera that will match the perspective in mugen.  I take a screen shot of mugen, and use it as a background image when setting up the camera properties.
Go to your render settings and turn off Antialiasing
Render your file and save it as .png with Alpha Channel enabled.

When you open it in Photoshop, the edges will be opaque and the background will be cut out for you.

It may be useful to save another version of the render with masking colors, so you can use a smart palette later on.

Make a material 100% self lit and make it a multisub object with different colors for each sub material.
Assign a different color to the parts you want to mask and render your image.

In Photoshop, you can use that masking render to make selections on the normal render easily.

you can render an animation for the real 3D effect or a single frame to use like normal sprites.

[rednavi -RETIRED]

God, luckily for me I also have 3D max, I'll save all that info on a readme once I get inta a pc. I actually know how to model some stuff in maya because I know most of the tools but I didnt know what kind of scale to use, and most important, I have this fatal basic flaw and is that I dont know how to set 2 images so I have both planes to start modeling a char (I can set an image on scree but its either bound to the whole screen or to the center of the working field but it wont rotate with it, it's always facing to the screen). maybe I should just make 2 primitive tall cubes ang give them the frontal and sideview images of the model I wanna do.

[LM_MAVERIK]

God, luckily for me I also have 3D max, I'll save all that info on a readme once I get inta a pc. I actually know how to model some stuff in maya because I know most of the tools but I didnt know what kind of scale to use, and most important, I have this fatal basic flaw and is that I dont know how to set 2 images so I have both planes to start modeling a char (I can set an image on scree but its either bound to the whole screen or to the center of the working field but it wont rotate with it, it's always facing to the screen). maybe I should just make 2 primitive tall cubes ang give them the frontal and sideview images of the model I wanna do.

The scale depends on what kind of stage you want, Hi res or low res, and I would suggest using a base stage so you know the parametres. then you can resize the maya render view to fit them, also on rendering you should change the antialising by switching off premultiply in render settings then adjust the threshold to about 200 to remove antialising even from alpha textures. I always render out as targa since there is no loss of colour information but like bleed said png is good as well.

if you want to use reference for a character by planes, you just create two planes and change the aixis in the channel box to facing z and the other to x. then change the 2 boxes to reference in the channel box via the membership swatch to make them non selectable. I wasn't really planning on covering that in my tutorial since that is sort of the basics character modelling.

I'll try to break my tutorial down as much as possible into easy steps.