Customization!

The next real step in setting up the engine for this game is to get characters walking around in the level. To that extent, I need to solidify my character asset workflow.

Since I'm using Oblivion's character setup, I at least eliminate the need to come up with that. It also opens up a slew of tools that already exist to make this easier on me. Notably a program called FaceGen. FaceGen can generate pretty believable face meshes and textures (and some not-so-believable), as well as process a photo or three to try and reproduce an existing person's noggin. You can even set up your own base models to use for the heads, and someone set one up for Oblivion's races -- it even exports very very close to seamlessly to my body mesh. There's a slight seam along the neck where it doesn't line up quite right, but it is very close. I can fine tune it some later. Or, at least, the seam will very often be disguised by clothing.

Or not, if you're naked a lot.

But I'm also pondering how best to handle character animation. I'll be using a combination of vertex and skeletal animation, I know. Skeletal animation to handle body movement (with animations such as 'walk' or 'idle'), and vertex morphing for facial animation, to blend facial expressions and lip-synch phonemes. FaceGen actually comes in very very very handy for that. It can export morph targets for the standard phonemes as well as basic emotions and poses (angry, sad, blink left, blink right, etc). I am noticing some discrepancies in the exported data, though. Notably, the morph track names are lost, and there are empty tracks. Exporting a test head results in, say, 5 tracks called '1' rather than a single track named 'Phoneme: Aah'. Four of the tracks have no animation data, but the fifth works just fine.

I already have a simple command line tool to fix up body part materials and skeleton naming conventions (the exporter does not support slashes in the material or skeleton names). OgreMax definitely seems to be geared towards having a single mesh and a single skeleton rather than multiple meshes on one skeleton.

Also, I finally got together a NIF/KF import plugin for 3d studio max 2010 64 bit, so I can ditch Max 9 finally. No need to import into 9, save, load in 2010, set up textures, then export. This will help immensely.

Since I'm setting up character stuff, I've been pondering the level of customization I can pull off. Currently it breaks down much like so:

Male: Slim, athletic, muscular, bulky, and body builder
Female: A-F cup, H cup, K cup; Small, medium, large, and extra large booty
Wangs: Large and less-large size; foreskin or no; flaccid, semi- and fully erect. (That is to say: Large, flaccid, and with foreskin is one variation. Large, semi-hard, and without foreskin is another).

This leaves us with 12 variations on penis appearance, 36 variations on female body shape, and basically 5 variations on male body shape -- though, realistically, it's 25 as we can mix-and-match an athletic torso with, say, a bulky lower body. I'm not sure I see that happening a great deal.

What I'm a little less-than-satisfied with, so far, is the lack of variation in penis size. With the assets I have on hand, there are two sizes. This might make it tricky to believably simulate a mutagenic substance turning a character into a primal breeding machine. Hmm. Perhaps this will need to be rectified later.