Thinking
Outside the Box:
3DS Tutorial #1: CyberGuy
|
Vol.
2, Issue 13
February 23, 2000
|
Cyberdude
Part 1
Recently
on a trip to Australia with Tim Willits promoting Q3A, a rabid
fan at a pool hall in Sydney accosted me. This fan, hopelessly
dedicated to the dream of keeping all shooters exactly like Quake,
raised an interesting question concerning identifying with your
virtual counterpart when playing on-line. His hypothesis was
that since people are acutely aware that they are ‘playing’ on-line
and their ‘character’ is a blatant computer generated piece of
art, why not make the digital aspect of said ‘computer character’
even more apparent? Basically he wanted me to admit that devolving
today’s graphics to the level they were in the Tron days or pre-Quake
days was a great idea in order to better identify with
your character. Well…it’s not and I won’t.
With the
level of artistry, complexity and richness evident in Q3A’s
wall textures, levels, and characters, don’t hold your breath
hoping to get the graphics anything but better from now on. The
art in Quake III Arena is easily the best in its genre and is
only slightly surpassed by games that feature pre-rendered art
or ultra-slow game technology. However, if you truly want to
more accurately identify with your character when playing Q3A
or most fps games, identify with a box…as in bounding
box. The outer appearance of your character has no reflection
on anything other than…how it looks. In Q3A, all bounding
boxes are the same. All jumping, running, shooting and damage-taking
capabilities are the same. The characters’ looks in are solely
for the sake of diversity and aesthetic appeal only.
Still,
the discussion did get me thinking about a great first (and simple)
tutorial for this column and I thank the gentleman for planting
the idea. Keep in mind this will be a massive affair as I go
from point A to point Z and try to make this as comprehensive
as possible. Thusly, each week I’ll post more of it until it’s
done…
Here’s
what you’ll need to do this…
Tools
Used:
3DS Max
2.5 (2.0 and 3.0 should work as well)
Character Studio
2.0
PhotoShop 5.0
(or 4.0)
The theme of
the character is an unabashed ‘virtual’ character. But we still
need to make him humanoid.
Now this
illustration is basically a schematic for a beefy, heroic-kinda
guy with a skeleton underneath. Using this ‘schematic’ for reference,
let’s define some areas of mass or chunks of weight that
will ultimately represent the body of Cyberguy.
I divided
the upper and lower areas up for clarity’s sake. The reason I
have some areas blocked out from the front and some from the side
will be apparent as we get further into the tutorial. Now based
off the above diagram, look at the next image:
I need
you to download this jpg so we can be relatively on the same page
when we build Cyberguy. I’ll wait…hmmm…okay now that you’ve downloaded
him let’s get to work.
