(Blender) Character Update

Published on June 16, 2018.

Last week-end, I was writing down some ideas for small progress and improving the character came up on top. I’ve been using a version of the Mixamo Y-Bot that I split apart a few months ago. It provided the flexibility that I wanted, but looked somewhat insect-like and did not fit the polygonal-look of the other assets, because of its smoothness.

Character Mesh Changes

My wishlist had quite a few items on it: including reforming the hands, feet and hips so that the character looks more human. I wanted to split out the pelvis and the abdomen, since that was causing some animation issues: Mixamo has them with separate bones. Finally, I also wanted to reduce the polygon count and give some of the edges a sharp look.

In order to achieve these results, I applied some ‘Boolean’ and ‘Decimate’ modifiers on all the meshes. Y-Bot had separate spheres, centered at each bone. The union of these spheres with the bone meshes was cleaned manually and then I sharpened some edges manually and with a 20 degree angle clamp.

Results

This is definitely still a work-in-progress. The following screenshots show well what I’m aiming for. It is worth noting that the Split Mixamo Y-Bot featured 34k triangles. The simplified character that I produced features 7700 triangles.

Split Mixamo Y-Bot Simplified Character

Blender Impressions

I admit that Blender is a tool that I’ve sometimes frowned upon. At my previous work-places, I had built and helped build toolchains and workflows based on the expensive Autodesk 3dsMax and Maya. In the past week, I learned to tame Blender and modify my workflows to work well in it. I found that the main difficulty in taming Blender is the online help that provides direct help, focused on hot-keys, rather than explaining to the users the ideas and thought-processes behind the decent user interface.

Mirroring

To upgrade the arms and legs, I only worked on the left-side of the body. Then, I used the following steps to create the right-side meshes. This workflow also places the right-side meshes with the correct origin for the animations.

  1. Add the ‘Mirror’ modifier on the left-side mesh, deselect the ‘merge’ option. This creates a composite mesh with the left-side and the right-side overlapping. ‘Apply’ the modifier.
  2. Enter the vertex modification mode for the composite mesh.
  3. Select one of the vertices for the right-side part of the composite mesh.
  4. Press and hold CTRL + NUMPAD_PLUS until the whole right-side part of the composite mesh is selected.
  5. Press ‘P’ and select ‘Selection’ to split the composite mesh into a right-side mesh and the left-side mesh back.
  6. Select the old ‘Right(mesh)’ and click on the ‘pin’ icon in the Property Editor.
  7. Select the new right-side mesh object, named ‘Left(mesh).001’ by the split operation.
  8. Right-click on the X component of the transform of the pinned ‘Right(mesh)’ object and choose ‘Copy All to Selected’.
  9. Unpin and delete the old ‘Right(mesh)’.
  10. Rename the new mesh object from ‘Left(mesh).001’ to ‘Right(mesh)’.