How to Create a Character for Overgrowth

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

We can't have a character without a model, now can we? I use Blender3D, simply because it's free and powerful. I know that some folks have their favorite software, but I also 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 to to make your character's anatomy match 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, as the spider does not have a similar skeleton. I have not tried to create a new set of animations, but I may in the future, and will post a tutoiral on it.

We also have to remember that this is a game, and that games, especially unoptimized ones, don't always work well with high poly models, that is to say, ones with a very high 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.