Legacy:Player Modeling

Overview

Player modeling is creating all of the objects that resemble characters in the game. These characters can be anything: humans, aliens, robots, animals, insects, etc. They are normally the human-controlled or computer-controlled players (aka, bots), however, the same process can be slightly altered to produce Non-Player Characters (NPCs).

Related Topics

• Maya PLE Character Model Tutorial
• Topics On Modeling
• Linking Karma Ragdolls – Tutorial on linking and using custom karma ragdolls in Unreal Tournament 2003, by Skullbox
• NPC Support – Designing and creating custom Non-Player Characters
• Importing Milkshape Characters To UT2004

Discussion

Taken from the Polycount message board :

"Hey guys, sorry to butt into this discussion here. This is Lee Perry from Epic.

I noticed on your summary you suggested a 512x512 default skin size. I just wanted to point out that this can be significantly higher. I personally wouldn't bother doing a skin less than 1024x1024 unless you just feel uncomfortable working that large. The UT2k3 skins are actually 2 1024x1024 textures. One body, and one for the head.

Two ery important things to keep in mind here though are that using textures at that size require selecting "DXT1" compression when importing a TGA into the texture browser. Here's the rub... DXT1 does not allow for an alpha channel, therefore you would have to be very clever indeed about applying shaders to such a character. If you have an alpha channel in a skin, it should come in at DXT5 compression, which is obviously much larger, and I would definitely NOT recommend bringing in a bunch of 1024x1024s at DXT5. One is debatable.

Also, the way the engine handles state changes, it's better to have one larger texture than several smaller ones. Don't pile 3 256x256 textures on a model, it would be much more efficient to just do a single 1024 and get some bonus resolution.

Anyway, this isn't any kind of official information , just letting you know that if I were personally making character mods, I wouldn't bother working below 3000 polys or below a 1024x1024 texture, assuming I wasn't doing something funky that required an alpha channel.

Hope this stuff is helpful."

and

"Unreal Tournament 2003 still supports the same vertex animated meshes (the *.3d files ) that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament supported - although their speed has been optimized somewhat :-)

In fact you'll be using the same utilities to export them ."

Source: Polycount Message Board

also

"...with the Notify system in the animation tool provided, you can attach sound cues, particle emitters, or all sorts of other effects to your model, and have complete control over when and how they operate"

Source: Polycount Message Board