Sims 4 character customisation
sebastian.friston_f34eb580c1
Posts: 34
Just saw the demo video that the makers of The Sims 4 have put out, and its pretty impressive...
I can see the next generation of characters & tools being built to have this interface work alongside the traditional sliders. Just taking into account the time to find in the menu system a morph which alters one part of the character, this would improve the workflow quite a bit (for those of us that have too much installed and not enough of a memory anyway...)
I also wonder though, how it could be retrofitted to work with existing IP. Perhaps a plugin that maps between morphs and polys allowing you to click one part of a character you want to change, and then showing just the morphs that alter it.
Maybe also with a 'heat map' - on top of the model - that changes as you hover over each morph, so you can see which vertices will be altered and by how much, and from that you can guess what the morph will do... hmmm...
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Comments
while I do not have the sims, having seen game figure mesh I can tell you 90% of it is achieved through texture mapping.
The figures themselves are lowpoly blanks almost.
I looked at the Elder Scrolls figures from Skyrim for example with their creation tools and via nif export in ultimate uvunwrap and carrara the textures are indeed impressive and lots of fancy rigging but the mesh very simple.
I was curious if I could mod them to look like my friends etc and concluded it was mostly just a lot of work in GIMP rather than any 3D stuff!
to be perfectly honest to get your friends into 3D mesh form, you are better off buying a very good camera and looking at skin tutorials as well as using faceshop for shaping and full body photos in Daz studio background and dialing up morphs to match.
That's interesting to know about The Sims! I must re-install and take another look at it. Judging by the changes to the nose width and jaw height though in that video (that I should have said is for the Sims 4 - still in development) they must be doing non-trivial modifications to the geometry, based on the changes occluding the environment. I would imagine something like a set of morphs which were selected & dialed in and out based on mouse motions, but if the deformations are directionally dependent it may be even more advanced than that.
I don't think this workflow would enable character creators to do anything they can't do now, but I do think the idea - that of 'structured' or 'guided' direct manipulation of a mesh (with the 'structure' being a morph) could make their work *much* faster.
Especially for the detailed work, where its not even clear whether certain morphs affect the part of the face you are interested, e.g. 'lower face' morphs which don't make alterations high enough up the cheek, and vice versa.
As noted, sims characters and their tech are vastly different from what we do with DS and poser. What you are seeing in the video is more of a "look at whats new with Sims4" rather than some new tech. Personally i would be happy if that way of character modeling never made it into this community, LOL.
I used to do commercial Sims2 development and still do addons for Sims3. While much of the detail is based off of the textures, the mesh isn't that bad and does get subdivided in game. While I was looking forward to the Sims4, it looks like they are taking to much focus off the look of the characters since they look more cartoony than past versions.
I like sims 3 and want to get back into playing it. It seems like something always comes up when I go to play it. Right now it is doing an update to it which is taking time to download.