Now that we've taken a hammer to our characters face, we need to paint it - this is where I'll be using UE4 terms as I haven't worked with any other engine yet. While we're on the subject of deformation, I'd like to also say that for creating longer/ differently sized limbs (see ARK: survival evolved) that would be achieved by actually scaling the bones of the animation skeleton of the character, if you try and lengthen the limbs with morph targets, things might start breaking apart. It takes a while to set up so I'd suggest testing on a small scale and checking to see everything works. What they do is store the vertexes of a 3D model in different positions, like different poses, these poses can then be blended between by linking the transforms to a float (and then driving that float through another UI slider)Ĭreating the poses is a bit of a mission, you have to sculpt the extreme end of the slider when creating it so that the player can choose something in between that looks good, it's also quite a hassle to make sure they work with each other, as sometimes these pose transformations can stack on top of each other and send the characters eyebrows to space or something.įor example, this is how many morph targets I have for my main character customisation So, the main thing you'll want to focus on, with the sliders is called Morph targets, or Morph shapes, same thing really. I'm going to be writing this from the point of using Unreal engine, but a lot of the practices will transfer over, the only thing which may be a bit different is the materials, but we'll get to that later. I've also been creating 3D models for a number of years now. Just a heads up, my current experience with character creation amounts to this monstrosity and this update model Oh boy, this might be a long writeup, so here goes.

How to create your own game character