Getting characters into the game
How a character gets from Blender into Unity, and the small fixes that make clothes sit right.
Alongside the combat work, I've been bringing a big batch of character work into the game.
Blender to Unity
The characters are made in Blender and the game is built in Unity, so every change to a character means bringing it across again and hooking it back up: the materials, the animation, and what it can collide with.
What came across
This batch was a big one:
- Six body frames, from halfling-sized up to half-giant. Each race plays on its own body, so a dwarf really is shorter and broader, with its own reach and its own hitboxes (the invisible shapes the game checks a blade against).
- Heads, faces, hair and beards. Rather than a separate model for every face, a head carries shape keys: stored variations of the same model, like a wider jaw or a heavier brow, that can be dialled in and mixed. One head can become a lot of different faces. Body builds work the same way.
- Skin tones, painted onto the head and body when the character appears in the world.
- Cloth on long hair and hanging beards, so they swing as you move.
- Clothes: robes, cloaks, hoods, tunics and gambesons (padded cloth jackets, worn under armour or instead of it).
All of it is put together when your character appears, and it's shared with the other players, so everyone sees the same character. In the character creator, you can step through all of it with a live 3D preview.
The small stuff takes the longest
Most of the work is fixing the places where things don't quite fit. 3D clothes are thin shells over a body, and when two of them overlap the wrong way you get clipping: one poking through the other. This round of fixes:
- a hood that pinched in on the tunic's neckline
- elbows poking through the back of a cloak
- two small gaps at the top of a robe's undershirt
- a robe's shoulders sitting inside its own hood
Each fix happens back in Blender. Then the bodies are saved out again, imported again, and checked in the game. It's slow, fiddly work, but it's the difference between a character that looks put together and one that falls apart the moment it turns around.
Next
Next is armour: around two hundred finished textures (the painted images wrapped around a 3D model) and the materials that go with them, so each piece shows what it's made of.