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3D CHARACTER EDITOR

CATEGORY

Tools, Videogames

DESCRIPTION

Bachler's thesis project of a free customizable 3D Character Editor software for designers, students and Indie Companies to use and export for Game Development already optimized.

YEAR

February to July 2021

PROGRAMS USED

Maya, Unity

SCRIPTING LANGUAGES

C#

SOFTWARE DETAILS

OBJECTIVE

This software allows you to customize a provided base mesh to export a desired low poly character with all textures included for game development. This is a completely free software created for my bachelor's thesis in the Videogame Development and Design degree taken in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The objective of this project is to help students and videogame companies, who do not have the time, knowledge or money, to create characters for their games without having to follow the complete 3D modelling pipeline.

FEATURES

Customizes the face and body of a female or male base mesh with simple sliders, add hair, clothing, change colors and exports it for your videogame.

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  • Male or Female base mesh choice with fully optimized polycount and topology for videogame developement.

  • Customize all body and facial features easily with sliders (body type, head, nose, ear, chin, eyes and mouth).

  • Randomize All: all sliders will be set randomely to form a new character every time for infinite possiblities.

  • Multiple hair and clothing choices.

  • Choice of colors (hair, clothes, skin tone).

  • Real-time view of the editions.

  • Mesh rotation and zoom.

  • Full cycle between menus (will reset all edits if returned to main menu).

  • FBX Exporter (exports to the application files as "Character Editor_DataEXPORTED_MODEL.fbx").

  • Export all textures (exports the textures from the chosen meshes and chosen colors to the same application file).

  • All the textures can also be found in this folder, for any changes you might want to do after exporting or any issues encountered during the exportation of textures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12w4PUQDtfKb6dRQpHG4sVKMMa70wlxYP?usp=sharing

  • Maximum polycount with hair and clothing meshes included: 30k quads.

DEVELOPMENT

TECHNICAL DETAILS

In order to do this project, an extensive research and development had to be done which can be found in the bachler's thesis document in the github project page. The implementations and a summary of it are the following:

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  • Optimized base meshes for videogames in terms of polycount and topology (loops and rings for animations).

  • Optimized clothing meshes with the same objective.

  • Investigation and analization of the human anatomy in order to mark limits and make the most combination possible for infinite posibilities.

  • Creation of blendshapes in Maya of all the human anatomy limits, both in the base meshes and in clothing.

  • Menus and UI software design that had to be simple and very easy to use for students and non 3D artist to be able to understand.

  • Integration of meshes and blendshapes with the UI buttons and sliders inside Unity.

  • All coding in Unity C# to make the software functional, in terms of UI, UX, framerate, optimization and exportation.

  • Testing round with all types of professionals, even not in the videogame industry.

  • Final adjustments to assure infinite posibilities and to the UI of the software.

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