digman

Imagination... The brain's greatest asset... Whether creating a game engine as Josh has done, programming or creating a game plus artwork in general, imagination is the most basic nature of a human being.. This 3D WIP humanoid concept started out as a 3D sphere and evolved into what it is now at it's present stage... Artistic direction is what we need in a game or piece of art to keep us on track but it is always first from our imagination... What you see, you can create!

A Linux milestone for Leadwerks! Hard development work got you there...

The problem with rigify is the amount of bones it has after you generate the true rig from the meta rig. The WGT bones, you are advised to delete after generating the rig. Unity advises this course of action. Tearing apart a pre made complex rig can be done but seems like it would lead to headaches. Blender's rigging is not bad and I tried a few. Person opinion here, Rigify is great for regular animations for which is was created for.

The animation pipeline continues to established. This time using Blender's animation tools and the rig I created to make a walk cycle. We needed to start testing some animations in Leadwerks. Rick will test soon and according to his information we can find tune and figure out any problems. The rig has only the control bones now showing. Next is to create the control shapes and those will hide the control bones. I am glad the old days of just having paper manuals is history. Manuals are good but Youtube with tons of Blender tutorials really helps. Yes you have to hunt and peck through a lot tutorials but you find some real nuggets. I also have an CG Cookie account... I was thinking about how much it cost to make a game from just the artistic software and game engine software. Leadwerks $200 or $99 Blender-- Free Wings3D--Free XNormal Free Gimp or Krita Free 3DCoat professional version $360 DDO Indie version $250 Total $810. add another $190 for loose ends and you get a total of $1000. Now of course I can be missing stuff, like for coding so pipe in and give a price for coding software. Also you could spend tons more on software as there is ZBrush, Maria, Substance Painter, 3DMAX and a slew of others. Software cost money but a great team is priceless!

I looked at and used the Rigify plugin but to increase my rig knowledge, I rather build my own rig...

As Dave is texturing, I started to build our first basic character rig from scratch. Soon we can give some animations to Rick to start testing and working on. This rig still has a few problems but all in all works well. The rig can be adjusted to meet varied human type of characters. I am working on creating this production pipeline, from creating rigs, exporting out of blender and importing the animations (working correctly) into Leadwerks. The rig in the picture is shown with all the armatures showing ,relationship lines and axis showing. I still need to add the bone shapes for the controllers. Of course all the bones will not be exposed when animating but only the bone controller shapes.

Yes Sir, nice indeed...

I will write various articles as we progress through the making of Phobia. Our team Dave, Rick, Rose and myself are like the Leadwerks promo states "turning players into game makers". In the end hopefully some things we learn you can use as well. As Josh said marketing is considered before one line of code is written so it is with modelling, UV set creation and texture \ normal map workflows. My first job as I saw it when I joined the Phobia team was to establish a modelling and texturing workflow that could be used through the entire process of the game. This took some testing and then a final workflow settled on. Regardless of software used a repeatable and consistent workflow is vital for production. This helps the different modellers and texture artists keep consistent as they work on the overall scheme of the game. If the team increases then any new artist can be brought up to speed quickly. I will leave any coding articles to Rick...

You got your love now Rick. Us artist would be squat out of luck if there were no programmers. Even thinking about programming makes my head hurt...

On the new collision detection. If you build your simple shapes or if you model is simple enough just duplicate that shape (object) including them in the model file and the shapes are named "Collision", they will become the collision object upon importing the FBX model. Correct? Lots of good stuff coming down the pipeline for Leadwerks, Thanks for the hard work you are doing.

No problems in Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit so far... All is well in OZ... Like my other comment at the forum... Updater worked correctly. Then when I started to run a map, Leadwerks said I needed to update my map which was done through the Project Manager... I just updated "MyGame" and two files were updated.

In the newer "versions 4" of 3DCoat, you do not have to manually mirror uv islands. Any uv island that is the same just use the copy and paste function for layering mirror uv islands...