Over the course of the coming months we will cover a variety of topics including animation, shaders, automation, scripting, and modeling, showing you our studio tools and techniques which we use for developing art content. I’m sure that other developers have done this but we wanted to show you art development sort of under the covers – what exactly goes into building the art assets in a project such as ours.

To start off, we will be showing you the various stages of our cinematic and outsourcing pipeline. The art team at Space Time is an experienced crew; artistically and also technically. Yet we are spread about working with so many various authors from around the world and therefore one of the biggest challenges that we knew we faced was consistency and naming conventions.

To work around this issue we developed Autoskel, a tool that generates perfect humanoid character skeletons.

The tool is easy enough for any artist with even beginner level of experience to use and it produces skeletons that have an exact naming convention as well as limb orientation. This allows us to easily import animation data into Autodesk Motion Builder ™, where it can be altered and personalized for characters of any shape or size.The way that it works is by stepping the artist through the precise placement of different bones providing diagrams each step of the way.

The artist begins the process with a Max file that has a character mesh…nothing else. The artist runs the autoskel script which takes control of the viewport and automatically locks in the “Move” control. Autoskel then displays this diagram prompting the artist to place the spine bones the and illustrates what the proper placement actually is. This eliminates all guess work from the equation while at the same time expediting the use of Max’s interface.

As soon as the artist is satisfied the they have accurately identified the placement of these bones, Autoskel then takes takes control of the viewport again and requests positioning for the leg joints, again with very clear cut instructions of precisely where we expect those joints to be in regards to the character.

The process continues on and on until the hands are completed. Through many of the steps during this process certain Axis are locked to prevent improperly laying limbs out of proper alignment. We lock axis for arms/elbows, fingers and the legs while allowing the artist to place the joints the right way in an extremely intuitive manner.

And at the end of the process, the artist is presented with a last chance for adjustments and review before the skeleton will be built and finalized.

With this tool any artist can create a perfect joint-oriented skeleton with very precise placement and naming of the bones within a mere few minutes. Also, because this tool can be used by any artist it also helps the character modelers understand why model limbs have to be laid out in a specific manner resulting in fewer headaches for the animators.

This is but one of our multitude of tools we have created to mass-produce our game. Soon we will show you a tool called Autorig that we created. It is used, not surprisingly, to rig the skeletons created by Autoskel.Best,

• Ranjeet Singhal

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under Art Team Blogs, Developer Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.