Hi folks,

since designing skill icons and GUI Style Progress in a good pace for me I decided to look at my own roadmap and there it was "Character Creation".

Character Creation itself is in my opinion one pillar of a game, especially in Online Games and there especially RPGs.

So I've been looking for some examples over the web (some sound quite promising but rather disappoint at the result) and I found I'd say the pinnacle of character creation (for now, along with Elder Scrolls partly and others) within an RPG (MMO) - Black Desert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TP4L1vHfpk

Of course I do not aim to be at this quality but rather I want to know basic ideas how to approach this task on the right way. I mean maybe some of you already got knowledge about it, maybe some of you want to do the same. So I wanted to make a thread where we could gather some ideas (from programming side to artistic site).

Please note that I am neither a programmer nor an artist nor I have that much informations what Esenthel is capable of regarding meshes, and other things. The following ideas could be totally wrong or at least a bit right

Another point is: what I want to collect are ideas which are the way to the goal.

1. The Character - the product of the Character Creator

Basically what you get are custom data regarding hair color, etc. stored within a model. My approach here is to say "okay, you got the model you want to - save the settings in a database and connect it to your account. Whenever you login the settings of the character will be applied and generate the character model you created"

2. The Character Creator

2.1 Basic Deformation

The basic options for deforming in the mechanical way (yes, i am a mechanical engineer sorry for that =)) are translation and rotation. Another option would be scaling (defined x-y-z relation, for example z=2x, y=x means y behaves like x while scaling while z scales 2 times faster/more than x or respective y, and so on)


2.2 Character Models and Meshes

My approach here is to split the Model into different body parts, for example
Head
Body
Arms
Hands (maybe fingers?)
Legs
Feet

Within these parts you can freely move transform or scale. The only point here - and I am not really sure about this so correct me if I am wrong here - is that you have to define boundary values between two mesh parts.

For example arms and hands. The length of both (arm and hand) is not depended on each other while the transition area - the wrist - between both is important.
I mean you cant have an arm which is 0,5 x units thick while your hand and the wrist only have 0,17 x units thickness. Same goes for Head - Neck - Body, and such things.

I guess this would be the most difficult part to realize in the engine.

2.3 Esenthel's handling of meshes and such thing

This is the big questions for me right now. Does anybody know if construction a mesh with smaller parts of the mesh inside Esenthel?

I mean you can use the Skeleton as a general "skeleton" to say where each mesh part has to be but I am not really sure if that would work out that good.


That's it for now. I will add some pictures drawn by myself to improve this post. I hope the task is understandable and yeah... I'm looking forward to your input

I've done some extensive work in Esenthel with customizing meshes, and here is my 2 cents:
1 This can be done via storing a bunch colors and arrays pertaining to the parts. On receiving the data from the server, the mesh can be modified to make the settings 'permanent', as well as the textures can have the color data applied to them.

2.1 I would say this is spot on. I would also map the vertices of the starting model as well into groups so that you could apply the transforms to just the specific region.

2.2 You could use this method-stitch the meshes together by moving the vertices around the edge of each child mesh to the same position as the partner vertex on the parent mesh. It would take a little work to make sure each mesh was set up properly to work with this system(as well as some fancy mathmatics in code), but I'm sure it would work.

2.3 Esenthel's meshes are built to have multiple parts. myMesh.parts[i].base.<mesh data> (see http://www.esenthel.com/?id=doc#API/Mesh/Mesh_Part ) These parts can be swapped out with alternates. I have only used a single part, so I am unfamiliar with the relationships between parts, but again, with some slightly fancy mathmatics, it shouldn't be an issue at all.

And by the way, that video made me drool. Thanks for posting it. I will have to get that game specifically to play with that character creator.

I agree the video is so cool

that video is so freaking amazing. I will definitely play this game.

Anyway thanks for starting threads like that. They will definitely help and I will glady help anywhere I can, as long as I can with my free version.

May I ask what game you try to create?

(04-11-2014 08:30 PM)Rubeus Wrote:  [...]

2.2 You could use this method-stitch the meshes together by moving the vertices around the edge of each child mesh to the same position as the partner vertex on the parent mesh. It would take a little work to make sure each mesh was set up properly to work with this system(as well as some fancy mathmatics in code), but I'm sure it would work.

2.3 Esenthel's meshes are built to have multiple parts. myMesh.parts[i].base.<mesh data> (see http://www.esenthel.com/?id=doc#API/Mesh/Mesh_Part ) These parts can be swapped out with alternates. I have only used a single part, so I am unfamiliar with the relationships between parts, but again, with some slightly fancy mathmatics, it shouldn't be an issue at all.

And by the way, that video made me drool. Thanks for posting it. I will have to get that game specifically to play with that character creator.

thanks for the reply, the 2.3 part really got me interessted. I will definitely look into it later.

And yeah, that video got me. This is amazing but on the otherhand - they focused 75% of the team on that so that's that ^^


@ninty:

in short - it is a concept game which features the relevant features of my game, such as skill system, split raid system, Player to Player interaction, combat system manly pvp focused, maybe an AI and ofc - the character creation.

Top Priority is the Skill(Spell)System and the corresponding character stats along with the GUI design at the moment

Sorry for necroposting but there is no point of creating one more topic on such theme.
I can imagine how to adjust values to the mesh to change size and thickness of parts of a model, but there is one question that i do not know how to do

How to perform armor rendering on such mesh?
For example we made an arm 0.5x long and 0.5x thick. How do I know how to adjust my bracelet to be drawn on the same part of a hand?

You would have to save the values of the customization. The .5x for the length and thickness would be needed both for creating/rendering the armor, as well as sending to other clients so they could accurately produce your customized character.

(01-25-2015 07:42 PM)Rubeus Wrote:  You would have to save the values of the customization. The .5x for the length and thickness would be needed both for creating/rendering the armor, as well as sending to other clients so they could accurately produce your customized character.

But that also needs position offset.
And if we perform vertex adjustment (not whole part) then we will need somehow transform armor vertex adjustment. How to know what vertexes to adsust?