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Help me with claws [3D]

Started by February 20, 2013 04:04 PM
6 comments, last by DaveTroyer 11 years, 9 months ago

Trying to render the character for a game I had in mind and been doing mockups for here http://www.gamedev.net/topic/638962-drago-and-his-adventures-mockups-included/ but now I'm stuck. How do you manage to make claws/fingers identical and add it to the body?

dragorender.jpg

Best regards

Fred

Most 3D programs have a copy and paste function as well as transforms like scale, flip horizontal, etc. So you can make one claw, then copy it, scale the second one to be a little smaller for the pinky/ring finger, copy it again, stretch it to be a little shorter and wider for the thumb, rotate that to oppose the first two. Then you can connect them by drawing polygons between them to make the palm and wrist. The writs and shoulder are going to both have a circular cross-section, ideally with the same number of points, and you can just select the two and extrude and arm between them, then poke at it a bit to give it an elbow. Presumably you are already using mirror on your model. If it doesn't automatically mirror the new arm, turning it off and on again might fix that.

I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.

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Not sure if that helps you, but this guy has a pretty good video of how he does hands in Maya.

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Did help alot! Thanks man!

I notice you use Blender. Newer builds of Blender have a Skin modifier that you can use to form tricky geometry like hands. You extrude line segments and scale the weighting of the vertices, then apply the modifier and edit from there.

I notice you use Blender. Newer builds of Blender have a Skin modifier that you can use to form tricky geometry like hands. You extrude line segments and scale the weighting of the vertices, then apply the modifier and edit from there.

Thanks! Will look into it as soon as I've finished watching Naruto! :P

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Check out 3:20 of this speed model video:

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I'm a little sick and grouchy, so I'm sorry if I come off as harsh in this post; I'm just trying to help. biggrin.png

I like the video, but I think it should be clarified that the model is (very) high-poly and not suitable for in-game. The reason I mention this is because well, we're on a game development board and its better to reinforce good habits early as opposed to fixing time consuming and potentially bad habits later.

One thing that I noticed in the original post was some wasted geometry on your character. Granted, it really depends on what platform you're developing the game for and what kind of system requirements you're looking at, but it's easier to create a low-poly model with strong geometry that you can add detail to later than it is to cut down a model with too many polygons once you find out it lags a high-end machine.

Anyway, another thing you might consider doing for the claw is to get a general idea of the poly's you'll be working with on the arm as it comes down to the wrist. If there is too much or uneven geometry, you'll end up having a whole ton of polygons on the hands alone or even quads and tris mixing together with other, even higher vertex polygons, which will make skinning and rigging a serious pain and make the model pretty much unusable.

So my advice would be to plan a couple steps ahead; nothing too complex, but with more practice, you'll start seeing how things can get goofed up if you take different steps.

Oh and to answer the question, claws/hands/anything at the end of an arm or leg will take practice to get right and I would take a look around the web for tutorials on hands, though most of them use something like 1k for a single hand, and to me that's just a waste.

Good luck!

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