Custom Characters

Daystar · Post by **Daystar** » Tue May 13, 2008 2:17 pm

I was wondering if anyone had tried to make a function in a game using Irrlicht that would allow the player to customize their character's avatar. I need to know how would I go about doing this I'm not sure if all you have to do is make separate models and skins then pre-load then then as the player switched through the different parts then they are attached to the base model in a mesh viewer. I could really use some help with this.

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Tue May 13, 2008 6:15 pm

Can you please describe in more detail exactly what you need cause that's bit too general for any serious help.
Describe what you're trying to do, what you want to get and then it would be easier for us to help you.

Daystar · Post by **Daystar** » Tue May 13, 2008 8:01 pm

Well like if you were going to change the character's cloths,hair eye color, skin tone, etc...

JP · Post by JP » Tue May 13, 2008 8:12 pm

If it's just the colours you're changing then that's just done by maybe vertex colours (with some editing to how vertex colours are used as they're sometimes ignored) or changing the colours of the texture directly, maybe creating a new texture for the user's specific setup they want.

Do you also want to know about attaching things like helmets, armour, weapons etc...? That's what i thought your original post was more about.

Daystar · Post by **Daystar** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:15 am

JP wrote:If it's just the colours you're changing then that's just done by maybe vertex colours (with some editing to how vertex colours are used as they're sometimes ignored) or changing the colours of the texture directly, maybe creating a new texture for the user's specific setup they want.

Do you also want to know about attaching things like helmets, armour, weapons etc...? That's what i thought your original post was more about.

The original post did include attaching things to the person too, would you be able to help me with that?

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed May 14, 2008 11:20 am

You can attach elements to joints of skeletal animated meshes (such as b3d, ms3d, and .x). Those joints are moved according to the animation defined for that particular mesh.
For non-animated meshes you can simply child those nodes to the parent.

JP · Post by JP » Wed May 14, 2008 11:20 am

In way, never done it myself but it's been talked about a lot on here and is fairly simple in principle.

The best way to do it is to use a model format that supports bones/joints (i.e. ms3d, x, b3d etc) and then you can connect things to the skeleton of your model, so you could attach a sword to the hand joint so your character holds it and swings it around like a sword when the arm is animated.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Wed May 14, 2008 3:23 pm

In my setup I used 2 textures, one as a basic colour map, and another signifying areas which recieve custom colouring (Thats in red, blue is for reflective stuff kind of like a specular map and green is for dirt), look at this example here:
http://irrlichtirc.g0dsoft.com/BlindSide/modMap.JPG

Then in the shader I apply the "ModMap" with the same texture coordinates as the base texture and lerp between the custom set colour and the base texture colour based on the red value of the ModMap.

This allows me to create many different coloured ships like so:
http://irrlichtirc.g0dsoft.com/BlindSide/ingame.JPG

A very similar approach can be used for your requirements, eg. Marking hair and other stuff with a custom colour that can be changed.

Changing the vertex colour is also a good idea, another simpler approach is to just have seperate meshes for the hair and the body and other modifiable areas.

To attach meshes you gotta grab the bonescenenode and do a setParent() on the weapon.

Good luck