Wolfire Games Wiki - User contributions [en]

"Corpse" of clan Wolf Blood

2012-04-03T08:39:20Z

Korban3: /* The Challenge */

=Character Overview=
The first character we meet in the [[Overgrowth]] web comic titled "Mad Dog", Corpse's true name has not been revealed yet. He is a major role in the plot line of the comic and appears to be one of the central characters. He is first seen through the narration of [[Janner]], who is observing Corpse from above. Is rescued by [[Janner]] and whisked away while still unconscious from his fight with the unnamed rival. He has played, so far, a role in keep the others of [[Janner]]'s party alive and has opted to remain with the group after a narrow escape from a band of [[Raiders]] who came upon them while resting in a cave oasis, out in some desert.
=In the Comic...=
==The Challenge==
Corpse is on the cave pyramid of New Rakan, "about to make the worst decision of his life." as [[Janner]] puts it. He challenges an unnamed, white dog, perhaps of clan Long Tooth [specualtion; can one of the devs confirm/deny?], who informs Corpse that he must wait one month before challenging him again, as stated in "the code".

There is a bit of banter in which Corpse accuses the white dog of being a coward and hiding while the entire Wolf Blood clan perished defending the place. After said dialogue, Corpse engages his opponent in an attempt to gain some semblance of vengeance for his clan. His puts the white dog off balance, who manages to loose a spear into Corpse's left thigh. Despite his wound, Corpse continues the fight with his knife, clutching the gash in his leg. The white dog ends the fight then, by planting a slim, slender dagger, likely a cat main gauche, upward through Corpse's right eye.

The blow, while devastating and fight ending,does not kill him, as we soon find out. The rival orders Corpse's body be thrown into the trash heap for the bottom feeders because the Wolf Blood graveyard is too full. He is carried away by two smaller dogs, subjugated and ordered around by the dogs of larger breeds. His body is tossed into the trash, wrapped in a black shroud, while [[Janner]] comes down from the hillside to ensure that he receives a proper burial. Arriving just in time, [[Janner]] stopped the bottom-feeders from eating corpse on the spot. Offering them food for assistance in moving Corpse and time to consider an offer of a better life elsewhere, [[Janner]] manages to recruit the three unfortunates.

Leaving New Rakan behind, the group travels up the hillside, moving upward and opposite the opening of the large cave, to [[Janner]]'s food cache. The three new members who have tagged along are [[Brummie]], [[Taff]] and [[Chase]]. The group stops for a bite to eat and the three decide to continue with [[Janner]] instead of returning to the trash heap at New Rakan.

TO BE FINISHED, DAWG.

"Corpse" of clan Wolf Blood

2012-04-03T08:30:14Z

Korban3: An unfinished page detailing the Overgrowth web comic character Corpse.

Dogs

2012-04-03T07:50:42Z

Korban3: /* Notable Dogs */

Dogs are capable warriors and craftsmen, and are fervently loyal to those of their clan.

==History==
[[Image:Dog ruins.jpg | thumb | 300px || Ancient dog ruins]]
The race of Dogs has been present on the island of Lugaru for a very long time, as some ancient dog ruins suggest.

==Culture==

This section will describe Dog cultural practices and common beliefs.

==Politics==

Description of Dog clans and political relations.

==Military==

===Warfare===

Description of weapons and armor and combat styles.

====Weaponry====

''Main article: [[Equipment and Weapons#Dog Weapons|Dog Weapons]]''

[[Image:Dogweapons1thumbs.jpg|thumb|300px||All the currently made dog weapons in Overgrowth]]

Dog weapons are characteristically sturdily-built, and incorporate repeated rectangular motifs. The weapons released so far can be categorized into three basic types:

=====Polearms=====

The polearms are longer weapons, with some sort of blade affixed to the end of a pole, to allow for greater reach. This allows for dogs to wage battles against without allowing their enemies to enter close-quarters combat, limiting the effectiveness of natural weapons such as teeth and claws.
=====Blades=====

The dogs use single-edge blades on their swords and daggers, which they use at closer range than the polearms. The blades are a strong example of the rectangular motifs used in the dog culture, and carry a distinctive, polygonal-shaped blade.
=====Warhammers=====

The dog warhammer is a massive weapon, and must be carried in both hands. It is very cumbersome and unwieldy in battle, but still remains commonly used by the leaders of [[clan Stone]], because of its cultural and historical significance (see below). Though cumbersome, the weapon is highly effective against heavily armored or unusually tough opponents.

===Famous battles===
The Battle of Steel Quarry was a brief skirmish between the Dogs of clan [[Clan Stone|Stone]] and the Dogs of clan [[Clan Sword Breaker|Sword Breaker]]. Prior to the battle, the leaders of both clans, [[Tarl of clan Stone]] and [[Kaz of clan Sword Breaker]] had agreed to a duel to settle a land ownership dispute surrounding a granite quarry. Kaz had attempting to poison Tarl the night prior to duel, and so felt that Tarl would be forced to submit. However, Tarl had suspected the food he had eaten was poisoned and purged his stomach after the meal. Kaz, sure that his poisoning had succeded, waited in his camp for a messenger from Tarl telling of his inability to fight, but no messenger arrived. Having waited most of the day, Kaz was forced to rush to the duel location to meet Tarl. Having come unprepared to fight a healthy and fully equipped adversary, Kaz was forced to concede.

To seek revenge for his loss, Kaz decided to attack the Dogs of clan Stone as they came to the quarry one morning. After laying in wait among the rocks, the Sword Breakers attacked the dogs of clan Stone who had only basic tools to defend themselves with. Despite superior numbers and equipment, the mobility of the clan Stone Dogs and their familiarity with the terrain gave them the upper hand and allowed them to defeat clan Sword Breaker.

==Religion==

Description of Dog religious beliefs and deities.

==Notable Dogs==
*[[Kaz of clan Sword Breaker]]
*[[Tarl of clan Stone]]
*[http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/04/the-origin-of-wolfire/ Wolfie] - A legendary (and near-mythological) dog warrior of great cunning and bravery.
=="Mad Dog" Web Comic Dogs==
*[["Corpse" of clan Wolf Blood]]
*[[Brummie]]
*[[Taff of clan Bone Tooth]]
*[[Janner of clan Stone Cutter]]
*[[Chase, whose clan can go to hell]]

[[Category:Dogs]]
[[Category:Overgrowth]]

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T05:14:17Z

Korban3: /* The Color Map */

== DISCLAIMER ==
THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT! It is not perfect, and is undergoing refining and polishing. This is also not a tool or code specific tutorial. Although you may not need to know alot before hand, this page assumes that you can stumble along just like I did, and get through this process until I get all the kinks worked out.

== Introduction ==
Now that that's out of the way, I want you to make sure that you read the Disclaimer right above this sentence. So, you want to make a new character for Overgrowth, huh? Well, this page will hopefully assist you in achieving your goal, or at least nudge you in the right direction. This is not a tutorial about how to use the tools I used. I will simply show you my process, and provide hints.

== The Toolbox ==
THIS WILL BE BROKEN INTO SUBCATEGORIES LATER

THESE TOOLS WILL HAVE LINKS LATER ON

I use Blender 3D for modelling and working with skeletons when I make characters, but I specifically use the 2.55 beta release because that is what David used for the current scripts. I have not gotten the .phxbn import and export addons to function in the newer 2.5x releases, but I will work it. Blender does take a little time to get familiar with, but it is rewarding once you've gotten it under your fingers.

I use Sculptris for the clothes scultping and for painting textures onto my models. It works very well, and is extremely easy to pick up and use right off the bat. It is also free, and is distributed and developed by the company that produces zBrush, which is not free, but I've heard is more advanced than Scultpris.

I use PaintdotNet to mix color maps and detail maps for the textures.(More on that later) It is free, and very easy to use. Although it isn't as great as Photoshop, I've stuck by it because it comes close to Photoshop's capabilities.

I use Notepad ++ for script editing, which is free and is also simple to use. Nuff said.

== The Model ==
Before we get started, I reccommend keeping all of you character's new files in a folder until we add them to Overgrowth.

We can't have a character without a model, now can we? I use Blender because David has provided us with some fancy scripts in the Overgrowth releases that allow us to import and export our very own skeletons and animations out of and into the Pheonix Engine. These scripts are located under Overgrowth\Data\BlenderScript\addons (at least for now). The folder io_phxbn contains the files necessary to work with the Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) file format for skeleton rigs in Blender. The io_anm folder is used to import and export animations using Blender.

Although I'm not going to tell you what your model should look like, or how to go about building it, you need to know about a couple of things.

First, that unless you intend to create a whole new set of animations, which is possible, I would advise you to make your character's anatomy similar to that of any of the current functioning characters so that you can use the old animations on the new characters. So, if we make a giant spider, we'd have to make a new running animation, a new jump, crouch, ledge hang, and attack and so on and so forth. I have not tried to create a new set of animations, but I may in the future, and will post a tutorial on it.

We also have to remember that this is a game and that games, especially unoptimized ones, don't work well with high poly models, (Models with a large number of polygons) so we have to keep it reasonable. I compare to some Overgrowth character models when I want to keep the polygon detail similar between existing characters and the new ones.

Although a tutorial may be made on basic character creation, I'm not going into detail until the rest is finished.

So, now you've got your character modelled and ready to rig, but wait! How do we rig it for Overgrowth? David uses his own, epic file format. You're going to need Blender (2.55 until I test this on other 2.5x versions) for this part. When you install Blender 2.55, I reccommend installing somewhere other than where normal Blender is installed, and when prompted where to install user data files, select "Application Directory" so that the files are with Blender. Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blenderscripts/addons and copy the io_phxbn folder. Now, go to you Blender installation directory. Paste io_phxbn into Blender/2.55/scripts/addons. Now when you run Blender 2.55, go to user preferences, and open the Add-ons tab. Find Import/Export Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) and make sure that this addon is enabled. Save as default, and now we can export our new rigs, and import existing .phxbn rigs. Export your character to .obj file format.

=== Clothing ===
I used Sculptris for modelling the clothing onto the nude character. The biggest reason I had for doing this was that Sculptris increases poly count as you need it, where you need it. So rather than having to edit the shape manually or use other methods, we can sculpt them on to our existing character. After we've opened up Sculptris, we'll need to get our model. Import the .obj file, and if it asks to go to paint mode, tell it no. When Sculptris brings you model up, find the symmetrical button. It's a box with a two-way arrow on it. If your character's base model is to be non-symmetric, don't hit this. If you want to make sure your base model is symmetric, or want symmetric clothes, then turn this on. Now that it's on, if you're going to have symmetrical clothing, leave this on. Otherwise, turn it off. All that did was set it to x-symmetry, that way both sides match up. If you keep it on, as you sculpt the same thing will happen to both sides of the character. If you turn it on and then turn it off, you will have a symmetric model that can then have non-symmetric details added.

I like to have a concept to look at before I begin adding clothes. It helps to keep in mind what you wanted, and how it should look. It also gives you a chance to decide that you don't like that idea after all. Use the inflate and draw tools to add volume and shape. You adjust the slider up top to change how many faces get created as you sculpt. I find that this wasn't tuned to fit game models well because it either adds no new faces, or it adds too many, no matter how careful you are with adjusting the detail slider. This means that you'll be working with the existing vertices more often than adding new ones to create the proper shapes. You can add these faces as needed in Blender, but Sculptris doesn't have a live update feature, so it's possible, but it would be painstaking.

Like modelling your character before, I'm not going to force a certain method on you. When making belts, try to keep them following a line of vertices, even if it's just a loose path. It will help to define the shape before we go to texturing. You can also use Sculptris to paint bump maps, although I haven't figured out how to use these as normal maps yet. These will help to give even better details, as it paints the light on a low resolution model using a texture to change how the light is drawn. In effect, it can distort light on a surface to look like it is more detailed than it is, and is a useful method to create better looking, but still efficient models.

Experiment with Scupltris to get a good feel for its controls, and sculpt your clothes on. Remember that this is no supposed to look like a finished product yet: It will only be the shape of you model, you can use the painting to get it to look much better.

== The Rig ==
Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blender Files and open an exisiting character's rig. I like to use Turner's for characters of similar size and shape. If you are making a big character, or a canine, or a long tailed, short eared character, open the wolf's rig file. If not then open one of the others and see which one's skeleton is most like your character. For now, this means rabbits and wolves, but more will be added as Overgrowth is developed. Select the skeleton, and look in the right panel (Default Layout). Open the tab that has a little stick figure on it, spread eagle. There should be a set of four blocks of boxes. In the top right block, click the box in the bottom row, third from the right. Now, all we should see is the model, and the plain skeleton. Select the current character model, and delete it. Import your character's .obj file, and select the skeleton. In the right panel, go to the same little stick figure tab, and find the two boxes marked Pose Position and Rest Position. Hit the Rest Position button.

With the skeleton selected, go into Edit Mode. Move the balls of the bones around to change the skeletons shape to fit your character. Once that's done, go into Object Mode. Deselect everything. Select the model, and then Shift+Select the rig (Default Button Controls). Press Ctrl+P and select "Armature Deform" --> "with Automatic Weights". That should rig your character to the skeleton. Selecting the rig, change the setting under stick figure tab from Rest Position to Pose Position. Now your character should go to an animation if the .blend file you opened had one preloaded. Look you character over and see if you can spot any errors. These may include, but are not limited to unwanted spiky things, unwanted distortion of body parts, and some parts missed by auto-rigging.

If these errors arise, then select the rig. Enter Pose Mode, select the model and then enter Weight Paint Mode. Select the bone that isn't weighted properly and change the weight painting on the mesh to get it right.

Now that your rig is done, and it has been weighted for your character, let's get it into the engine. Select you skeleton, then go to File-->Export-->Pheonix Bone(.phxbn). You will want to export to your desktop, or your resource dump for this character. This rig won't work alone, though. We'll need to write a piece of xml later on to get it working, but we need to get all of the texturing and such done first.

== The Textures ==
There are a few ways to get your model textured. You can export a UV map from Blender and use a 2D painting application, but I'm going to cover using Sculptris for painting. We're going to use Sculptris to generate the UV texture by producing a detail map, and a color map, and mixing them in PaintdotNet. I'll also cover some basics with normal maps and where I plan to go with those.

=== The Detail Map ===
Open Sculptris and import your model from its .obj file we exported earlier. If you're prompted to enter Paint Mode, then you have to check something. Is your character symmetric along the x-axis?

If the model is symmetric or you want it symmetric, but you want to paint the two halves individually, then don't go to Paint yet. Enter Sculpt and make it symmetric, then turn off symmetric, and proceed to paint.

If you have a symmetric model or want it symmetric and want it painted symmetrically too, then enter Sculpt and set it to symmetric. Proceed to Paint.

If you have an entirely non-symmetric model, then you can't use symmetry when painting: Go to Paint.

This is the part where you have to experiment with Sculptris' painting tool. You can choose a different material for display, which is fun to toy with. You can also disable material color, so that the materials color won't change how your painting looks. If you use the texture box on the top left, you can paint images onto your model. Sculptris has some good ones under its install location, inluding a good fur one. If you do use these, I reccommend dabbing like a sponge for clean, clear painting, and do short click-pulls for a finer, mor continuous look. With the fur texture, for example, dabbing pruduces tufty spots, but individual drags produces shorter, finer fur. Experiment with brushes and textures, but remember to keep this image greyscale. It's important that there is no color. And don't make the detail map too dark. If it's too dark, then your colors will come out blackened.

When you are detailing clothing, your lines don't need to be ultra clean. If they're blurred you can use the color map to make them appear more fine and clean. Once you've finished your detail map, open the advanced options menu near the top left, and save the texmap to your resource dump. Leave the detail map open on your model: it'll help with the coloring.

=== The Color Map ===
I'd advise disabling brushes and textures here. We only need to paint with solid colors. Paint over your detail map with the desired colors. Although they will be darkened by the greyscale detail map, we can adjust the brightness later. As you paint, keep in mind that clothes lines are often clean and defined, so do it here, if they were a little vague on the detail map. Natural lines like fur color shifts, stains, and such are a little blurrier. Again, you'll have to experiment with Sculptris to find how you like to work with it.

==To Be Continued==

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T04:59:13Z

Korban3: /* The Textures */

== DISCLAIMER ==
THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT! It is not perfect, and is undergoing refining and polishing. This is also not a tool or code specific tutorial. Although you may not need to know alot before hand, this page assumes that you can stumble along just like I did, and get through this process until I get all the kinks worked out.

== Introduction ==
Now that that's out of the way, I want you to make sure that you read the Disclaimer right above this sentence. So, you want to make a new character for Overgrowth, huh? Well, this page will hopefully assist you in achieving your goal, or at least nudge you in the right direction. This is not a tutorial about how to use the tools I used. I will simply show you my process, and provide hints.

== The Toolbox ==
THIS WILL BE BROKEN INTO SUBCATEGORIES LATER

THESE TOOLS WILL HAVE LINKS LATER ON

I use Blender 3D for modelling and working with skeletons when I make characters, but I specifically use the 2.55 beta release because that is what David used for the current scripts. I have not gotten the .phxbn import and export addons to function in the newer 2.5x releases, but I will work it. Blender does take a little time to get familiar with, but it is rewarding once you've gotten it under your fingers.

I use Sculptris for the clothes scultping and for painting textures onto my models. It works very well, and is extremely easy to pick up and use right off the bat. It is also free, and is distributed and developed by the company that produces zBrush, which is not free, but I've heard is more advanced than Scultpris.

I use PaintdotNet to mix color maps and detail maps for the textures.(More on that later) It is free, and very easy to use. Although it isn't as great as Photoshop, I've stuck by it because it comes close to Photoshop's capabilities.

I use Notepad ++ for script editing, which is free and is also simple to use. Nuff said.

== The Model ==
Before we get started, I reccommend keeping all of you character's new files in a folder until we add them to Overgrowth.

We can't have a character without a model, now can we? I use Blender because David has provided us with some fancy scripts in the Overgrowth releases that allow us to import and export our very own skeletons and animations out of and into the Pheonix Engine. These scripts are located under Overgrowth\Data\BlenderScript\addons (at least for now). The folder io_phxbn contains the files necessary to work with the Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) file format for skeleton rigs in Blender. The io_anm folder is used to import and export animations using Blender.

Although I'm not going to tell you what your model should look like, or how to go about building it, you need to know about a couple of things.

First, that unless you intend to create a whole new set of animations, which is possible, I would advise you to make your character's anatomy similar to that of any of the current functioning characters so that you can use the old animations on the new characters. So, if we make a giant spider, we'd have to make a new running animation, a new jump, crouch, ledge hang, and attack and so on and so forth. I have not tried to create a new set of animations, but I may in the future, and will post a tutorial on it.

We also have to remember that this is a game and that games, especially unoptimized ones, don't work well with high poly models, (Models with a large number of polygons) so we have to keep it reasonable. I compare to some Overgrowth character models when I want to keep the polygon detail similar between existing characters and the new ones.

Although a tutorial may be made on basic character creation, I'm not going into detail until the rest is finished.

So, now you've got your character modelled and ready to rig, but wait! How do we rig it for Overgrowth? David uses his own, epic file format. You're going to need Blender (2.55 until I test this on other 2.5x versions) for this part. When you install Blender 2.55, I reccommend installing somewhere other than where normal Blender is installed, and when prompted where to install user data files, select "Application Directory" so that the files are with Blender. Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blenderscripts/addons and copy the io_phxbn folder. Now, go to you Blender installation directory. Paste io_phxbn into Blender/2.55/scripts/addons. Now when you run Blender 2.55, go to user preferences, and open the Add-ons tab. Find Import/Export Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) and make sure that this addon is enabled. Save as default, and now we can export our new rigs, and import existing .phxbn rigs. Export your character to .obj file format.

=== Clothing ===
I used Sculptris for modelling the clothing onto the nude character. The biggest reason I had for doing this was that Sculptris increases poly count as you need it, where you need it. So rather than having to edit the shape manually or use other methods, we can sculpt them on to our existing character. After we've opened up Sculptris, we'll need to get our model. Import the .obj file, and if it asks to go to paint mode, tell it no. When Sculptris brings you model up, find the symmetrical button. It's a box with a two-way arrow on it. If your character's base model is to be non-symmetric, don't hit this. If you want to make sure your base model is symmetric, or want symmetric clothes, then turn this on. Now that it's on, if you're going to have symmetrical clothing, leave this on. Otherwise, turn it off. All that did was set it to x-symmetry, that way both sides match up. If you keep it on, as you sculpt the same thing will happen to both sides of the character. If you turn it on and then turn it off, you will have a symmetric model that can then have non-symmetric details added.

I like to have a concept to look at before I begin adding clothes. It helps to keep in mind what you wanted, and how it should look. It also gives you a chance to decide that you don't like that idea after all. Use the inflate and draw tools to add volume and shape. You adjust the slider up top to change how many faces get created as you sculpt. I find that this wasn't tuned to fit game models well because it either adds no new faces, or it adds too many, no matter how careful you are with adjusting the detail slider. This means that you'll be working with the existing vertices more often than adding new ones to create the proper shapes. You can add these faces as needed in Blender, but Sculptris doesn't have a live update feature, so it's possible, but it would be painstaking.

Like modelling your character before, I'm not going to force a certain method on you. When making belts, try to keep them following a line of vertices, even if it's just a loose path. It will help to define the shape before we go to texturing. You can also use Sculptris to paint bump maps, although I haven't figured out how to use these as normal maps yet. These will help to give even better details, as it paints the light on a low resolution model using a texture to change how the light is drawn. In effect, it can distort light on a surface to look like it is more detailed than it is, and is a useful method to create better looking, but still efficient models.

Experiment with Scupltris to get a good feel for its controls, and sculpt your clothes on. Remember that this is no supposed to look like a finished product yet: It will only be the shape of you model, you can use the painting to get it to look much better.

== The Rig ==
Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blender Files and open an exisiting character's rig. I like to use Turner's for characters of similar size and shape. If you are making a big character, or a canine, or a long tailed, short eared character, open the wolf's rig file. If not then open one of the others and see which one's skeleton is most like your character. For now, this means rabbits and wolves, but more will be added as Overgrowth is developed. Select the skeleton, and look in the right panel (Default Layout). Open the tab that has a little stick figure on it, spread eagle. There should be a set of four blocks of boxes. In the top right block, click the box in the bottom row, third from the right. Now, all we should see is the model, and the plain skeleton. Select the current character model, and delete it. Import your character's .obj file, and select the skeleton. In the right panel, go to the same little stick figure tab, and find the two boxes marked Pose Position and Rest Position. Hit the Rest Position button.

With the skeleton selected, go into Edit Mode. Move the balls of the bones around to change the skeletons shape to fit your character. Once that's done, go into Object Mode. Deselect everything. Select the model, and then Shift+Select the rig (Default Button Controls). Press Ctrl+P and select "Armature Deform" --> "with Automatic Weights". That should rig your character to the skeleton. Selecting the rig, change the setting under stick figure tab from Rest Position to Pose Position. Now your character should go to an animation if the .blend file you opened had one preloaded. Look you character over and see if you can spot any errors. These may include, but are not limited to unwanted spiky things, unwanted distortion of body parts, and some parts missed by auto-rigging.

If these errors arise, then select the rig. Enter Pose Mode, select the model and then enter Weight Paint Mode. Select the bone that isn't weighted properly and change the weight painting on the mesh to get it right.

Now that your rig is done, and it has been weighted for your character, let's get it into the engine. Select you skeleton, then go to File-->Export-->Pheonix Bone(.phxbn). You will want to export to your desktop, or your resource dump for this character. This rig won't work alone, though. We'll need to write a piece of xml later on to get it working, but we need to get all of the texturing and such done first.

== The Textures ==
There are a few ways to get your model textured. You can export a UV map from Blender and use a 2D painting application, but I'm going to cover using Sculptris for painting. We're going to use Sculptris to generate the UV texture by producing a detail map, and a color map, and mixing them in PaintdotNet. I'll also cover some basics with normal maps and where I plan to go with those.

=== The Detail Map ===
Open Sculptris and import your model from its .obj file we exported earlier. If you're prompted to enter Paint Mode, then you have to check something. Is your character symmetric along the x-axis?

If the model is symmetric or you want it symmetric, but you want to paint the two halves individually, then don't go to Paint yet. Enter Sculpt and make it symmetric, then turn off symmetric, and proceed to paint.

If you have a symmetric model or want it symmetric and want it painted symmetrically too, then enter Sculpt and set it to symmetric. Proceed to Paint.

If you have an entirely non-symmetric model, then you can't use symmetry when painting: Go to Paint.

This is the part where you have to experiment with Sculptris' painting tool. You can choose a different material for display, which is fun to toy with. You can also disable material color, so that the materials color won't change how your painting looks. If you use the texture box on the top left, you can paint images onto your model. Sculptris has some good ones under its install location, inluding a good fur one. If you do use these, I reccommend dabbing like a sponge for clean, clear painting, and do short click-pulls for a finer, mor continuous look. With the fur texture, for example, dabbing pruduces tufty spots, but individual drags produces shorter, finer fur. Experiment with brushes and textures, but remember to keep this image greyscale. It's important that there is no color. And don't make the detail map too dark. If it's too dark, then your colors will come out blackened.

When you are detailing clothing, your lines don't need to be ultra clean. If they're blurred you can use the color map to make them appear more fine and clean. Once you've finished your detail map, open the advanced options menu near the top left, and save the texmap to your resource dump. Leave the detail map open on your model: it'll help with the coloring.

=== The Color Map ===
I'd advise disabling brushes and textures here. We only need to paint with solid colors. Paint over your detail map with the desired colors. Although they will be darkened by the greyscale detail map later, we can adjust the brightness later. As you paint, keep in mind that clothes lines are often clean and defined, so do it here, if they were a little vague on the detail map. Natural lines like fur color shifts, stains, and such are a little blurrier. Again, you'll have to experiment with Sculptris to find how you like to work with it.

==To Be Continued==

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T04:52:44Z

Korban3: /* The Textures */

== DISCLAIMER ==
THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT! It is not perfect, and is undergoing refining and polishing. This is also not a tool or code specific tutorial. Although you may not need to know alot before hand, this page assumes that you can stumble along just like I did, and get through this process until I get all the kinks worked out.

== Introduction ==
Now that that's out of the way, I want you to make sure that you read the Disclaimer right above this sentence. So, you want to make a new character for Overgrowth, huh? Well, this page will hopefully assist you in achieving your goal, or at least nudge you in the right direction. This is not a tutorial about how to use the tools I used. I will simply show you my process, and provide hints.

== The Toolbox ==
THIS WILL BE BROKEN INTO SUBCATEGORIES LATER

THESE TOOLS WILL HAVE LINKS LATER ON

I use Blender 3D for modelling and working with skeletons when I make characters, but I specifically use the 2.55 beta release because that is what David used for the current scripts. I have not gotten the .phxbn import and export addons to function in the newer 2.5x releases, but I will work it. Blender does take a little time to get familiar with, but it is rewarding once you've gotten it under your fingers.

I use Sculptris for the clothes scultping and for painting textures onto my models. It works very well, and is extremely easy to pick up and use right off the bat. It is also free, and is distributed and developed by the company that produces zBrush, which is not free, but I've heard is more advanced than Scultpris.

I use PaintdotNet to mix color maps and detail maps for the textures.(More on that later) It is free, and very easy to use. Although it isn't as great as Photoshop, I've stuck by it because it comes close to Photoshop's capabilities.

I use Notepad ++ for script editing, which is free and is also simple to use. Nuff said.

== The Model ==
Before we get started, I reccommend keeping all of you character's new files in a folder until we add them to Overgrowth.

We can't have a character without a model, now can we? I use Blender because David has provided us with some fancy scripts in the Overgrowth releases that allow us to import and export our very own skeletons and animations out of and into the Pheonix Engine. These scripts are located under Overgrowth\Data\BlenderScript\addons (at least for now). The folder io_phxbn contains the files necessary to work with the Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) file format for skeleton rigs in Blender. The io_anm folder is used to import and export animations using Blender.

Although I'm not going to tell you what your model should look like, or how to go about building it, you need to know about a couple of things.

First, that unless you intend to create a whole new set of animations, which is possible, I would advise you to make your character's anatomy similar to that of any of the current functioning characters so that you can use the old animations on the new characters. So, if we make a giant spider, we'd have to make a new running animation, a new jump, crouch, ledge hang, and attack and so on and so forth. I have not tried to create a new set of animations, but I may in the future, and will post a tutorial on it.

We also have to remember that this is a game and that games, especially unoptimized ones, don't work well with high poly models, (Models with a large number of polygons) so we have to keep it reasonable. I compare to some Overgrowth character models when I want to keep the polygon detail similar between existing characters and the new ones.

Although a tutorial may be made on basic character creation, I'm not going into detail until the rest is finished.

So, now you've got your character modelled and ready to rig, but wait! How do we rig it for Overgrowth? David uses his own, epic file format. You're going to need Blender (2.55 until I test this on other 2.5x versions) for this part. When you install Blender 2.55, I reccommend installing somewhere other than where normal Blender is installed, and when prompted where to install user data files, select "Application Directory" so that the files are with Blender. Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blenderscripts/addons and copy the io_phxbn folder. Now, go to you Blender installation directory. Paste io_phxbn into Blender/2.55/scripts/addons. Now when you run Blender 2.55, go to user preferences, and open the Add-ons tab. Find Import/Export Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) and make sure that this addon is enabled. Save as default, and now we can export our new rigs, and import existing .phxbn rigs. Export your character to .obj file format.

=== Clothing ===
I used Sculptris for modelling the clothing onto the nude character. The biggest reason I had for doing this was that Sculptris increases poly count as you need it, where you need it. So rather than having to edit the shape manually or use other methods, we can sculpt them on to our existing character. After we've opened up Sculptris, we'll need to get our model. Import the .obj file, and if it asks to go to paint mode, tell it no. When Sculptris brings you model up, find the symmetrical button. It's a box with a two-way arrow on it. If your character's base model is to be non-symmetric, don't hit this. If you want to make sure your base model is symmetric, or want symmetric clothes, then turn this on. Now that it's on, if you're going to have symmetrical clothing, leave this on. Otherwise, turn it off. All that did was set it to x-symmetry, that way both sides match up. If you keep it on, as you sculpt the same thing will happen to both sides of the character. If you turn it on and then turn it off, you will have a symmetric model that can then have non-symmetric details added.

I like to have a concept to look at before I begin adding clothes. It helps to keep in mind what you wanted, and how it should look. It also gives you a chance to decide that you don't like that idea after all. Use the inflate and draw tools to add volume and shape. You adjust the slider up top to change how many faces get created as you sculpt. I find that this wasn't tuned to fit game models well because it either adds no new faces, or it adds too many, no matter how careful you are with adjusting the detail slider. This means that you'll be working with the existing vertices more often than adding new ones to create the proper shapes. You can add these faces as needed in Blender, but Sculptris doesn't have a live update feature, so it's possible, but it would be painstaking.

Like modelling your character before, I'm not going to force a certain method on you. When making belts, try to keep them following a line of vertices, even if it's just a loose path. It will help to define the shape before we go to texturing. You can also use Sculptris to paint bump maps, although I haven't figured out how to use these as normal maps yet. These will help to give even better details, as it paints the light on a low resolution model using a texture to change how the light is drawn. In effect, it can distort light on a surface to look like it is more detailed than it is, and is a useful method to create better looking, but still efficient models.

Experiment with Scupltris to get a good feel for its controls, and sculpt your clothes on. Remember that this is no supposed to look like a finished product yet: It will only be the shape of you model, you can use the painting to get it to look much better.

== The Rig ==
Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blender Files and open an exisiting character's rig. I like to use Turner's for characters of similar size and shape. If you are making a big character, or a canine, or a long tailed, short eared character, open the wolf's rig file. If not then open one of the others and see which one's skeleton is most like your character. For now, this means rabbits and wolves, but more will be added as Overgrowth is developed. Select the skeleton, and look in the right panel (Default Layout). Open the tab that has a little stick figure on it, spread eagle. There should be a set of four blocks of boxes. In the top right block, click the box in the bottom row, third from the right. Now, all we should see is the model, and the plain skeleton. Select the current character model, and delete it. Import your character's .obj file, and select the skeleton. In the right panel, go to the same little stick figure tab, and find the two boxes marked Pose Position and Rest Position. Hit the Rest Position button.

With the skeleton selected, go into Edit Mode. Move the balls of the bones around to change the skeletons shape to fit your character. Once that's done, go into Object Mode. Deselect everything. Select the model, and then Shift+Select the rig (Default Button Controls). Press Ctrl+P and select "Armature Deform" --> "with Automatic Weights". That should rig your character to the skeleton. Selecting the rig, change the setting under stick figure tab from Rest Position to Pose Position. Now your character should go to an animation if the .blend file you opened had one preloaded. Look you character over and see if you can spot any errors. These may include, but are not limited to unwanted spiky things, unwanted distortion of body parts, and some parts missed by auto-rigging.

If these errors arise, then select the rig. Enter Pose Mode, select the model and then enter Weight Paint Mode. Select the bone that isn't weighted properly and change the weight painting on the mesh to get it right.

Now that your rig is done, and it has been weighted for your character, let's get it into the engine. Select you skeleton, then go to File-->Export-->Pheonix Bone(.phxbn). You will want to export to your desktop, or your resource dump for this character. This rig won't work alone, though. We'll need to write a piece of xml later on to get it working, but we need to get all of the texturing and such done first.

== The Textures ==
There are a few ways to get your model textured. You can export a UV map from Blender and use a 2D painting application, but I'm going to cover using Sculptris for painting. We're going to use Sculptris to generate the UV texture by producing a detail map, and a color map, and mixing them in PaintdotNet. I'll also cover some basics with normal maps and where I plan to go with those.

=== The Detail Map ===
Open Sculptris and import your model from its .obj file we exported earlier. If you're prompted to enter Paint Mode, then you have to check something. Is your character symmetric along the x-axis?

If the model is symmetric or you want it symmetric, but you want to paint the two halves individually, then don't go to Paint yet. Enter Sculpt and make it symmetric, then turn off symmetric, and proceed to paint.

If you have a symmetric model or want it symmetric and want it painted symmetrically too, then enter Sculpt and set it to symmetric. Proceed to Paint.

If you have an entirely non-symmetric model, then you can't use symmetry when painting: Go to Paint.

This is the part where you have to experiment with Sculptris' painting tool. If you use the Texture box on the top left, you can paint images onto your model. Sculptris has some good ones under its install location, inluding a good fur one. If you do use these, I reccommend dabbing like a sponge for clean, clear painting, and do short click-pulls for a finer, mor continuous look. With the fur texture, for example, dabbing pruduces tufty spots, but individual drags produces shorter, finer fur. Experiment with brushes and textures, but remember to keep this image greyscale. It's important that there is no color. And don't make the detail map too dark. If it's too dark, then your colors will come out blackened.

When you are detailing clothing, your lines don't need to be ultra clean. If they're blurred you can use the color map to make them appear more fine and clean. Once you've finished your detail map, open the advanced options menu near the top left, and save the texmap to your resource dump. Leave the detail map open on your model: it'll help with the coloring.

=== The Color Map ===
I'd advise disabling brushes and textures here. We only need to paint with solid colors.

==To Be Continued==

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T04:37:32Z

Korban3: /* The Textures */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T04:32:03Z

Korban3: /* The Textures */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T02:49:45Z

Korban3: /* The Textures */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-20T02:49:04Z

Korban3:

== DISCLAIMER ==
THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT! It is not perfect, and is undergoing refining and polishing. This is also not a tool or code specific tutorial. Although you may not need to know alot before hand, this page assumes that you can stumble along just like I did, and get through this process until I get all the kinks worked out.

== Introduction ==
Now that that's out of the way, I want you to make sure that you read the Disclaimer right above this sentence. So, you want to make a new character for Overgrowth, huh? Well, this page will hopefully assist you in achieving your goal, or at least nudge you in the right direction. This is not a tutorial about how to use the tools I used. I will simply show you my process, and provide hints.

== The Toolbox ==
THIS WILL BE BROKEN INTO SUBCATEGORIES LATER

THESE TOOLS WILL HAVE LINKS LATER ON

I use Blender 3D for modelling and working with skeletons when I make characters, but I specifically use the 2.55 beta release because that is what David used for the current scripts. I have not gotten the .phxbn import and export addons to function in the newer 2.5x releases, but I will work it. Blender does take a little time to get familiar with, but it is rewarding once you've gotten it under your fingers.

I use Sculptris for the clothes scultping and for painting textures onto my models. It works very well, and is extremely easy to pick up and use right off the bat. It is also free, and is distributed and developed by the company that produces zBrush, which is not free, but I've heard is more advanced than Scultpris.

I use PaintdotNet to mix color maps and detail maps for the textures.(More on that later) It is free, and very easy to use. Although it isn't as great as Photoshop, I've stuck by it because it comes close to Photoshop's capabilities.

I use Notepad ++ for script editing, which is free and is also simple to use. Nuff said.

== The Model ==
Before we get started, I reccommend keeping all of you character's new files in a folder until we add them to Overgrowth.

We can't have a character without a model, now can we? I use Blender because David has provided us with some fancy scripts in the Overgrowth releases that allow us to import and export our very own skeletons and animations out of and into the Pheonix Engine. These scripts are located under Overgrowth\Data\BlenderScript\addons (at least for now). The folder io_phxbn contains the files necessary to work with the Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) file format for skeleton rigs in Blender. The io_anm folder is used to import and export animations using Blender.

Although I'm not going to tell you what your model should look like, or how to go about building it, you need to know about a couple of things.

First, that unless you intend to create a whole new set of animations, which is possible, I would advise you to make your character's anatomy similar to that of any of the current functioning characters so that you can use the old animations on the new characters. So, if we make a giant spider, we'd have to make a new running animation, a new jump, crouch, ledge hang, and attack and so on and so forth. I have not tried to create a new set of animations, but I may in the future, and will post a tutorial on it.

We also have to remember that this is a game and that games, especially unoptimized ones, don't work well with high poly models, (Models with a large number of polygons) so we have to keep it reasonable. I compare to some Overgrowth character models when I want to keep the polygon detail similar between existing characters and the new ones.

Although a tutorial may be made on basic character creation, I'm not going into detail until the rest is finished.

So, now you've got your character modelled and ready to rig, but wait! How do we rig it for Overgrowth? David uses his own, epic file format. You're going to need Blender (2.55 until I test this on other 2.5x versions) for this part. When you install Blender 2.55, I reccommend installing somewhere other than where normal Blender is installed, and when prompted where to install user data files, select "Application Directory" so that the files are with Blender. Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blenderscripts/addons and copy the io_phxbn folder. Now, go to you Blender installation directory. Paste io_phxbn into Blender/2.55/scripts/addons. Now when you run Blender 2.55, go to user preferences, and open the Add-ons tab. Find Import/Export Pheonix Bone(.phxbn) and make sure that this addon is enabled. Save as default, and now we can export our new rigs, and import existing .phxbn rigs. Export your character to .obj file format.

=== Clothing ===
I used Sculptris for modelling the clothing onto the nude character. The biggest reason I had for doing this was that Sculptris increases poly count as you need it, where you need it. So rather than having to edit the shape manually or use other methods, we can sculpt them on to our existing character. After we've opened up Sculptris, we'll need to get our model. Import the .obj file, and if it asks to go to paint mode, tell it no. When Sculptris brings you model up, find the symmetrical button. It's a box with a two-way arrow on it. If your character's base model is to be non-symmetric, don't hit this. If you want to make sure your base model is symmetric, or want symmetric clothes, then turn this on. Now that it's on, if you're going to have symmetrical clothing, leave this on. Otherwise, turn it off. All that did was set it to x-symmetry, that way both sides match up. If you keep it on, as you sculpt the same thing will happen to both sides of the character. If you turn it on and then turn it off, you will have a symmetric model that can then have non-symmetric details added.

I like to have a concept to look at before I begin adding clothes. It helps to keep in mind what you wanted, and how it should look. It also gives you a chance to decide that you don't like that idea after all. Use the inflate and draw tools to add volume and shape. You adjust the slider up top to change how many faces get created as you sculpt. I find that this wasn't tuned to fit game models well because it either adds no new faces, or it adds too many, no matter how careful you are with adjusting the detail slider. This means that you'll be working with the existing vertices more often than adding new ones to create the proper shapes. You can add these faces as needed in Blender, but Sculptris doesn't have a live update feature, so it's possible, but it would be painstaking.

Like modelling your character before, I'm not going to force a certain method on you. When making belts, try to keep them following a line of vertices, even if it's just a loose path. It will help to define the shape before we go to texturing. You can also use Sculptris to paint bump maps, although I haven't figured out how to use these as normal maps yet. These will help to give even better details, as it paints the light on a low resolution model using a texture to change how the light is drawn. In effect, it can distort light on a surface to look like it is more detailed than it is, and is a useful method to create better looking, but still efficient models.

Experiment with Scupltris to get a good feel for its controls, and sculpt your clothes on. Remember that this is no supposed to look like a finished product yet: It will only be the shape of you model, you can use the painting to get it to look much better.

== The Rig ==
Go to Overgrowth/Data/Blender Files and open an exisiting character's rig. I like to use Turner's for characters of similar size and shape. If you are making a big character, or a canine, or a long tailed, short eared character, open the wolf's rig file. If not then open one of the others and see which one's skeleton is most like your character. For now, this means rabbits and wolves, but more will be added as Overgrowth is developed. Select the skeleton, and look in the right panel (Default Layout). Open the tab that has a little stick figure on it, spread eagle. There should be a set of four blocks of boxes. In the top right block, click the box in the bottom row, third from the right. Now, all we should see is the model, and the plain skeleton. Select the current character model, and delete it. Import your character's .obj file, and select the skeleton. In the right panel, go to the same little stick figure tab, and find the two boxes marked Pose Position and Rest Position. Hit the Rest Position button.

With the skeleton selected, go into Edit Mode. Move the balls of the bones around to change the skeletons shape to fit your character. Once that's done, go into Object Mode. Deselect everything. Select the model, and then Shift+Select the rig (Default Button Controls). Press Ctrl+P and select "Armature Deform" --> "with Automatic Weights". That should rig your character to the skeleton. Selecting the rig, change the setting under stick figure tab from Rest Position to Pose Position. Now your character should go to an animation if the .blend file you opened had one preloaded. Look you character over and see if you can spot any errors. These may include, but are not limited to unwanted spiky things, unwanted distortion of body parts, and some parts missed by auto-rigging.

If these errors arise, then select the rig. Enter Pose Mode, select the model and then enter Weight Paint Mode. Select the bone that isn't weighted properly and change the weight painting on the mesh to get it right.

Now that your rig is done, and it has been weighted for your character, let's get it into the engine. Select you skeleton, then go to File-->Export-->Pheonix Bone(.phxbn). You will want to export to your desktop, or your resource dump for this character. This rig won't work alone, though. We'll need to write a piece of xml later on to get it working, but we need to get all of the texturing and such done first.

== The Textures ==
There are a few ways to get your model textured. You can export a V map from Blender, but I'm going to cover using Sculptris for painting.
==To Be Continued==

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T23:57:42Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T23:48:16Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T23:41:04Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T20:46:22Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T20:44:07Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:24:31Z

Korban3: /* The Model */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:23:33Z

Korban3: /* The Toolbox */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:20:59Z

Korban3: /* The Toolbox */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:20:13Z

Korban3: /* Introduction */

How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:13:46Z

Korban3: Created page with "== DISCLAIMER == THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT! It is not perfect, and is undergoing refining and polishing. This is also not a tool or code specific tutorial. Although you may not need ..."

How to create a character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:12:43Z

Korban3: Blanked the page

How to create a character for Overgrowth

2011-07-19T06:11:17Z

User:Korban3

2011-07-19T05:45:22Z

Korban3: Created page with "One day, I preordered Overgrowth. And so the love story began. But on a more important note, I'm going to help with the Wiki, even just a little. I'm not going to say much else, ..."

One day, I preordered Overgrowth. And so the love story began. But on a more important note, I'm going to help with the Wiki, even just a little. I'm not going to say much else, but I'd like to thank Conner36 for all of his work on it, since he did so much. Really, I'm just here to post up a tutorial, but if I can help, I will.