CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P10: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith, Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in getting this book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, Mike Duggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the Torque Game Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly made this book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want to thank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forum answers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine. I. | 248 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines With these changes your character mesh should be all set to work with the Kork player biped. Export a DTS shape named to the data shapes player folder. Save the old to another name first. The 3ds Max file and the character texture should be in the same folder you export to. The next time you launch the FPS sample game your character mesh should appear. You can find more information on exporting characters in Chapter 12. COMBINING BONES WITH BIPED What if you wanted a character with wings eight legs a cape or some other keyframable accessory Besides the option of creating a character exclusively with bones you can add additional bones to your biped just as we did with the helper bones in this chapter. The parts of the mesh that represent additional limbs or features can have their vertices assigned to the new bones. In Figure three bone chains have been added to the character to serve as the skeleton for a cape. The character mesh has been turned off for clarity. A simple cape has been created from a segmented box. The left bone chain is parented to the left clavicle the right bone chain to the right clavicle and the middle bone chain to the neck. These bones have FIGURE You can create a cape wings or additional limbs with bones. Chapter 10 Character Rigging 249 been properly named CapeLI etc. and included in the Skin modifier bone list. Attach the cape mesh to the character mesh. You can create a simple IK and controller for the bone chains to enable easier manipulation for keyframing the cape movement for the various animation cycles. SUMMARY We have looked at how to set up the biped to fit the mesh and how to minimize problems like collapsed vertices by using prerotated bones and helper bones. We have also reviewed how to apply a Skin modifier to the character mesh so that it recognizes the biped bones and how to use both envelopes and weighted vertex assignments to control this relationship.
