Hi, I guess a lot of people out there are in a similar situation to me where I am not a professional game developer, but a keen un-paid amateur working on a few projects in my spare time. I work on some of these projects alone and some are done in groups of 2 or 3 people. This involves being project manager, writer, designer, coder, 2D artist, 3D artist, musician and sound technician all at the same time. Obviously, when working under these conditions you *really* cannot afford to re-invent the wheel so you often find yourself downloading and re-using various code libraries, pieces of artwork, sound samples and songs from various Internet sites which provide these things freely. In my experience, you can find code, sound bytes, music and 2D artwork to suit any occasion plus you can download and re-use it freely. However, it seems it's the 3D artists who don't want to share! OK, perhaps I'm being a little unfair here :p ... there seems to be a moderate amount of props and static models out there as well as a light smattering of animated models. But if you try to find royalty-free rigged, animated 3D character models to re-use in any given game you'll be very lucky to find 5 and even those will require a lot of tweaking cos they'll be in different file formats and saved at hugely different scales. So how about a specification for modeling game characters and an accompanying web-site where users can submit animated character models for others to download and use in their games? I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a great modeler. I possibly have delusions of adequacy and the fact of the matter is that no-one else will *ever* use my models. But I'm still happy to create a couple of characters to share with the indie game development community on the off-chance that someone likes what I've done. If just 50 of the many users here at GameDev.Net were willing to create a couple of characters (or even just re-scale two of their existing characters, exporting them to the desired format) we'd be starting off with a very formidable library of 100 game-ready character models. Like I say... I'm no expert, but here are some initial ideas for those specifications: (please discuss) File format: .x Scale: 1 3D unit = 1cm Basic character actions: * stand idle * run (and/or walk - preferably 'and') * jump (should the model move upward and back down, or should that be left to the game engine?) * attack (plus optional alternate attacks) * die (plus optional alternate deaths) and how about lie down, crouch, talk? What others actions are commonly used?

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Seriously now, are there really *no* artists who like to share?

Just an opinion or some constructive criticism about the spec would be nice.

I'm not requesting a large team of pro modelers to dedicate hour apon hour apon hour to create top quality work for a bunch of freeloaders...

I am suggesting that the amatures out there (myself included) submit some of the models that we're creating for our own games into a pool that we can all use and benefit from. Just like the coders and the sound & music guys do.


Anyone?

Yeah, too true CakeMonitor,
All my attempts at 3d games have been using primitive shapes, which doesnt make for a great visual impact.
Simply because theres nothing free to use out there; not of any usable quality.

Id gladly use free models if some were available and fitted my game.

Great idea btw, the standard for the scale, file format and actions!

I would hope that eventually there will be the same thing someday, but youve already hit on the main problem -- the file format conversion problems cause (especially for animations).

What would be needed to make such a thing take off :

A standard skeleton (down to fingers -- options could have a LOD level omit the unneeded level of details).

A standard (well documented) data format that does all of the features (including multi file packaging). Seperate animation files, etc...

Converters/plugins to import/export (unfortunately features arent all common and that block many of the tool that would cause loss of features on editing.
Preference for features may have to be made to match the more popular 'free' editors.



A good feature also would be an easy to use animation creator (which could be used to create a plethora of highly reuseable animations for the standard skeletons). Something like poser with basic rotation sliders (and joint angle limiters) and possibly wave graph controls could be made without too huge an effort.

Having a clearing house for models and animations would allow some people to do the rough work, and others to do finer detailing/animations/reskinning etc... (allow open collaboration and specialists to employ their skills). Over time model/animation refinements/improvements/variants could be made as people make incremental contributions.


I would also suggest that people could also volunteer sample programs (source code) that actually load the models and run the animations -- in the more popular library/interface sets DirectX/OpenGL/etc...


Sounds to me like the whole thing could be organized as an open source project.

Thanks for the feedback. You make a good point about the standard skeleton, and I really like the LOD idea. Maybe we could have a text file which must be included with every model, the first lines in the file listing all the bone names in the standard skeleton so the modeler could simply comment out the bones which are not used. The remainder of the lines in this file could be in a format like this:

[animation name], [start_frame] - [end_frame]

This way the programmers can easily grab all of the seporate animations and check that the bones required for the game have been used in the model.


In regard to file packing I was thinking to keep things as simple as possible just to get the ball rolling. Say, simply a .zip file including the .x model itself, the text file mentioned above, and the textures (I guess these should be a standard format too - .png .bmp .jpg ?)


You mention creating simple animation software and format converters... while this would indeed be very cool, I personally see this as quite far down the line. As you said the features and formats may simply have to match the popular free editors. (That said, if anyone does want to develop this kind of software off the bat then don't let me deter you!)


Again, great idea with the cleaning house. Maybe have seporate sections on the web-site for finished models and wrok-in-progress models which state what has been done and what needs to be done.


Back to the skeleton...
The skeletons I've made are very simple (less than 20 bones) but as has already been mentioned we need something more complex to support the many needs of the many various games. Does anyone have a more thorough skeleton that they're willing to submit? Unless anyone has good reason to disapprove of the .x format or 1 unit = 1cm suggestions I made before, then the skeleton should be ~170 units tall (roughly 6ft) and saved as a .x file. I will try to re-scale and convert the file is nessicary.

I wish you good luck.

Check for free model packs, I know of a few. Then ask the authors if you can add their work to a database of free models; my guess is that they will want credit but that shouldn't be to hard to give them, if you do have such a text file with each model just a by-line would work (in most cases).

Let us know.

-slowpid

have a look on turbosquid! they've got free models . . .

The discussion you are having is precisely why such a character collection does not exist to my knowledge. Each (many) game/engine requires different skeletons/weighting, different polycounts, different cloth solutions, different UV mapping, etc. Ingame-art is rarely, if ever, developed before the engine, because the requirements must be set. Having a library of 'donated' models is going to require still a relatively large amount of tweaking and fixing so it works in a different project... so even programmers, who would benefit from such an endeavour, would need to end up learning basic modelling and rigging. The real challenge, methinks, would come in the coordination, however.

That said, I do think this is a good effort. Before asking for custom models, try searching sites like Turbosquid and other content sites, as well as asking Indie developers to use their models and art if it is generic enough.

If your intent is to create a library of art assets that will be used in released games, and not as programmer art, I can't say I think its a good idea, or even support it. Art is made for a specific game, genre, art style, etc., and therefore, does not translate well into other games. Additionally, artists are not really willing to see their hard work used in another (possibly competing) game, even with proper accrediting. That is why people release their subpar stuff for free, so people can use it when its needed, but its unlikely any artist will be in favor of releasing finished commercial pieces for other projects, nor is it likely to find finished commercial pieces that would fit properly in your personal/commercial endeavour.

Quote:

Original post by Professor420 The discussion you are having is precisely why such a character collection does not exist to my knowledge. Each (many) game/engine requires different skeletons/weighting, different polycounts, different cloth solutions, different UV mapping, etc. Ingame-art is rarely, if ever, developed before the engine, because the requirements must be set. Having a library of 'donated' models is going to require still a relatively large amount of tweaking and fixing so it works in a different project... so even programmers, who would benefit from such an endeavour, would need to end up learning basic modelling and rigging. The real challenge, methinks, would come in the coordination, however. That said, I do think this is a good effort. Before asking for custom models, try searching sites like Turbosquid and other content sites, as well as asking Indie developers to use their models and art if it is generic enough. If your intent is to create a library of art assets that will be used in released games, and not as programmer art, I can't say I think its a good idea, or even support it. Art is made for a specific game, genre, art style, etc., and therefore, does not translate well into other games. Additionally, artists are not really willing to see their hard work used in another (possibly competing) game, even with proper accrediting. That is why people release their subpar stuff for free, so people can use it when its needed, but its unlikely any artist will be in favor of releasing finished commercial pieces for other projects, nor is it likely to find finished commercial pieces that would fit properly in your personal/commercial endeavour.

I wouldnt see this as any attempt at commercial work. More of the amateur game/simulation programming. So many independant projects dont go anywhere because they get stopped by the heap of stuff you need to get one lousy human figure to walk across the screen. I myself am more interested in AI and dont mind having a (relatively) low poly human figure -- its more of a data representation apsect to me. It should look human and I sould be able to create a large number of animations (for all the interactions with 'furniture' objects as well as other figures). I eventually will build (finish) my own custom skeleton/animation and employ something like Blender to make the models (and probably rig up my own animation editor). But I could have more time for the AI if I didnt have to puta as much work into those sub projects.

Getting people started and doing basic figure animation with about as much work as you set up one of the DirectX samples programs would allow them to concentrate more on the special features they want (or like me, get back to the other hundred things that we want to get done). Thats why I emphasised the supplying of sample code as part of the 'clearing house' to make the common models/animations data useful to many more people.

If all we are interested in is 'programmer art' models, rigging, textures, etc., that wouldn't be for a final/released game, couldn't the developer/programmer just take the models from an existing game of similar ilk?