If I had tons of money... I'd fix 3D Modeling for indie games.

#1 I have thought along those lines also...was wondering when someone would mention it. I think that is the future of some game art pipelines. And it sure would be a lot nicer to us Indies. I would hope that a team here would come up with a tool like that...hhmmm

I think it is doable though, because you could essentially precode your components ahead of time...after all a certain leg or arm component would still act as a leg or arm no matter where you place it. Possibly with some modifiers. So you could get a lot of variation just with that..just some ideas..

I think that if you made a plugin to a 3D tool which essentially does the basics automatically for you would be a lot easier than writing a tool from scratch. Since the GUI is essentially 3D placement anyways. Plus handling of prefabs (heads, torsos..etc) is already there. Something like XSI which has full coding support would be ideal. The main problem I see is the UV mapping..since I think that is the most confusing and time consuming to me. And I just don't see an easy way to auto UV map..

but anyways that would be a nice tool if it could be done for torque :)

#2 Or you could just learn how to model and texture? Seriously, I hate game developers who think everything should be point and click. Learn to do something, don't whine because you don't want to learn.

EDIT: Can't fix what isn't broken.

#3 Hi Neill, thanks for your kind words :) I guess the point of being a game developer is that you want to spend your time developing games, not mucking around trying to get your models working in Torque or whatever other engine you're using. Or trying to UV map.

The point is that the modeling tools out there are the only ones in the pipeline that are entirely too complicated for their own good with respect to indie game development. To make music, you can use a simple program like Schism Tracker. To make levels? Easy. Worldcraft/hammer or even GarageGames' own Constructor. To make models? Take 4 years of university or prepare to spend all the time you should have been using to tweak your gameplay to rig your models.

#4 Hah, Neill, this would be useful for anyone. There's nothing wrong with streamlining and enhancing the way things are done. Increasing speed and efficiency in modelling and texturing is something everyone would love. Learning to do EVERYTHING game related with maximum skills is not something everyone does... you learn a few areas extremely well and then either source out and pay for things you can't do as well as you'd like, or find methods that allow you do to things easier.

I'm sure you'd be able to completely write a game engine from the ground up as capable as TGEA, model and texture with quality superior to anything else out there, lay out perfect gameplay and storyline, as well as script everything you want to work without flaw.

#5 But the thing is, you can easily learn to model. I can professionally model, and I do for my game studio, and I never have even finished high school yet. The magics of the internet.

#6 Hi Neill,

What program do you use to model characters or items in your games and can you point me to any tutorial sites you used to level up your knowledge about modeling? Thanks!

#7 Neill you have a website with some sample work we can look at? I figure anyone l33t enough to troll someone elses hypothetical tool thread ought to have a sweet portfolio.

#8 First off I'm gonna have to agree with Neil on this one.

As a matter of fact, as many times as I have gotten flamed around here for torque not being more user friendly to here some one say something like this kind offends me. We dont get a big red "make cool game button" to put our art into and you guys dont get a "make cool art asset" button for you game engine! and that is the way it should be.

People always want something without having to work for it. the reason the average person cant make good art is the fault of the program. 99.9995% of the time it is because the person is not a artist at all or is not a good one.

as for this comment:

Quote:
The point is that the modeling tools out there are the only ones in the pipeline that are entirely too complicated for their own good with respect to indie game development. To make music, you can use a simple program like Schism Tracker. To make levels? Easy. Worldcraft/hammer or even GarageGames' own Constructor. To make models? Take 4 years of university or prepare to spend all the time you should have been using to tweak your gameplay to rig your models.

Are you serious? hammer is prolly one of the worst programs ever written and constructor is not all that far behind it. thank god for polysoup.

I'm a full time modeler animator Self taught. and have been doing so for almost 10 years now. I too was a high school drop out. though I did go to community college and take commercial art. of course at that time there really was no 3D it was all just package design and page layout stuff. In 95 I picked it up cause I wanted to make stuff for games like quake. I was modeling and animating game characters with prolly the first 3-4 month of picking it up. The reason for this is that I'm and artist. I have been artistically inclined my whole life. And that is just the facts of it some people are artist and some people are not. 99.9% of the people in the community can code circles around me. The are programmers it is what they do.

#9 Ugh.. I had a huge reply typed out and when I clicked "Post Comment" it disappeared. Just a heads-up to anyone writing comments on blogs on this site, copy your reply to your clipboard before you submit it!

I will try to remember exactly how I said what I wanted to say.

First, I wanted to explain that this blog post was never intended to become a flame war. Nor was it intended to insult or trivialize the heroic work being put into the Torque engines by GarageGames. Torque (both 2D and 3D) are considered by me and others to be some of the best engines and in fact "game builders" in the industry.

Second, I wanted to touch base with respect to James and him saying that there isn't a big red button that we push as programmers that says "Make cool art assets" and likewise there is a lack of a big red button for artists that says "Make cool game". Why not? I thought the goal of Torque was to bring game development to the masses - to allow indie game developers the chance to make world-class games using world-class tools without world-class budgets. If that truly is the goal, then I think it's a good idea to look at (in my case anyway) stripping away some of the more technical details of modeling a character and really focus on creating great tools to easily allow anyone to create a game. Why must it be so time consuming and/or hard?

Also, I noticed that James mentioned that the price of CrazyBump was worth it because it had saved him man hours. After watching how simple yet effective CrazyBump is, I wonder why it is okay to be a fan of a time-saving tool like that but that it's not okay to want the same type of tool for character modeling? To me they are the same thing.

To summarize: From my perspective, skillset, and requirements as an indie game developer, I need a simpler tool to make game characters. I simply have not the time, resources, or artistic talent to use what's out there to make a 3D game. It's a huge barrier.

Thanks for listening guys & gals! Great discussion so far.

#10 @ John

Wish I had a straight forward easy answer for that request. I'll keep playing the Lottery, who knows..

Anyways, I think the closest thing to your request would be Poser, or Daz Studio, but the downside right now is the high poly count since the models are nearly real looking.
You can import the models to Lightwave at least and then tweak it from there. I tried this awhile back just to see if it would work and I wouldn't suggest it.. It's alot like scrubbing B-B-Q grills with a sponge..It's not clean and the sponge has little effect.

I'm still learning to use LightWave, it's affordable and does just as well as 3Ds Max for everything I have seen.
Modeling, Scenery, Animation it's all there and for $800 usd compared to $2000 (ish) for 3Ds Max, it's all I'll ever need.

Recently, the www.arteria-gaming.com/ site posted some fantastic elven city for those making an RPG game, the graphics look amazing. After looking over the site, I decided to get my Art content from them.
While I was there I purchased a tutorial for making Medieval homes and Last night I was able to complete 2 home Models with Interiors, got them into a test scene ( Barebones ) and ran around in glee.
The tutorial was very concise, each step explained and easier still because it's a video, i could rewind what wasn't clear to me.

I guess i'm just saying I support your Idea of a much more user friendly graphics package, but until then.. there is always www.arteria-gaming.com/ and other sites with excellent tutorials to get you up to speed quickly.

p.s. Why not drop Bill Gates an email, being the richest man on the planet.. I'm sure he could fund a team to make exactly what you seek. Who knows.. he might actually do it.. He still puts his pants on the same way as anyone else.

#11 Hmm, I think 3D modeling *has* been fixed. The solution is called ZBrush.

#12 @John - You are exactly right.

If today's software development tools were as arcane and tedious to use as some of the tools we're trying to use for game development... well, we might as well be using Notepad instead of Visual Studio or Eclipse.

"Real programmers don't need IDE's" is as much a myth as "Indie Game Developers don't need specialized tools."

Not to worry... there's a revolution brewing.... are you ready? :P

#13 I don't care what tools you use if you are not an artist that tool is still going to produce crap and you will then b!tch about it.

There is no tool that is going to replace talent! period.

I will grant you that some of the more affordable tools have horrible interface designs " blender" comes to mind. This is because these tools are designed by programmers going by some white paper written by some other phd that said this is how and interface should work. Wich is non-sense. when what they should have done especially since at that time blender was very well funded is find 3-4 ex ILM guys and ask them what they think a program should have for an interface. Programmers don't know 5h!+ about the needs of artist.

#14 @Rene,
ZBrush doesn't solve very many of the problems described here. Yes, it is a major shift in the way things are modeled, but you can't rig and animate with it. Not to mention, poly reduction prior to normal mapping, you still need to incorporate another app and that experience will be no fun for the uninitiated.

@James,
I couldn't agree more on the talent part, and most of your ideas regarding Blender's interface.

I don't really know what you mean about Blender being "very well funded". My understanding of Blender's funding is that it was donation only until 2002, then NaN purchased purchased the Blender Foundation and injected about $100 K into it. For the effort, I wouldn't say it was "well funded", but it was adeqautely funded for creating the software and underfunded in the human factors department.

The solution here, seems to be some sort of easily modifiable content packs.

#15 yeah the only package I know of that currently allows for editing of skinned rigged meshes is Maya. Unfortunately IMHO Maya has gotten the love it should from GG. out of the professional level packages it is the cheapest. I very excited about the next version of Maya and Mudbox. I have good feelings about what is in store for this pipeline.

@RollerJesus:
Yes you are right about the funding might point was there was a time with the program first was being developed when they had money that they could have gotten the input from the right people but instead based it on some guys with a PHd's paper called something like "the Human Interface" or something to that effect I used to could been able to tell you the guys name but it escapes me now. But regardless it was and continues to be a disastrous choice. I had a couple programmers that I was gonna pay out of my own pocket at one point to to customize it but, once they dug into the blender code they were like no thanks this is a mess. The updating of the blender interface is still on the to do list on the blender dev site but that has been there for about 2 years now. who knows if it will ever get done. I think blender is a great app with great potential I'm just not willing to completely relearn everything I know about 3D. Almost all 3D packages have some commonality in the way that they function blender follows none of these. In some cases it is like they went out of their way to make things different because there is no logic to some of it.

#16 I think to a large degree Neill and James are right. I personally don't think that at least for realistic-themed models, doing a "Spore-like" modeler (w/ generated animation) would work very well. Part of the reason the Spore thing even works is that the characters are all very "squishy/rounded/cartoony." And you'll notice the animation isn't all that great. I'm talking entirely arbitrary skeleton creatures though (ala Spore).

I do think that *some* things could be done in this fashion, though I still think it'd be better to make the mesh in an actual modeling package. However, for certain types of meshes/creatures (namely large snake like or aquatic creatures with no or few limbs), you could possibly use a technique like this (link, pdf warning) to define the mass/spring muscles used to animate it.

#17 @RollerJesus
Yes, that's absolutely right. Was thinking solely about the modeling aspect and ZBrush3 is just incredible in this respect (at least for organic structures).

@James
Absolutely agree with you that it's not the tools that make good artwork. They help or hinder but never *create* great work.

And the whole programmer/user dilemma is something that pertains to the entire field of software (except for software *for* programmers). Still, I think that good communication or having "cross-breeds" on your team can overcome this problem.

Blender is not helping to manifest that point, though. It was produced by Ton Roosendaal as an *in-house* tool exclusively programmed to the specification and needs of the artists on the team. The result was bad code (it was never meant to be a widely used and actively developed 3D package), but with an extremely streamlined interface with just those functions the artists needed and wanted.

#18 Hi All.

Yes, my idea was that the characters that come out of this "character generator" program would end up looking like something from Zelda: The Wind Waker, Final Fantasy 7 (real-time gameplay models, not cut-scenes) or Animal Crossing, which is perfectly fine for me and the types of games I like to play.

There is no doubt in my mind if you want realistic, high-quality models like the ones found in Counter Strike Source or Prey, then you've got to have a talented artist using an advanced modeling program like Maya, 3DS, etc. No doubt, no contest.

I would think for most quick, inexpensive indie games a tool like the one I'm after would produce a lot of unique and interesting content and it's something that we could all use and benefit from.

@Roller Jesus, yes a modifiable content pack seems to describe the functionality of this program well.

#19 Many content packs are complete with everything you need to modify them. You even get Install instructions for testing.
At first I thought this thread was the local chat club about making a graphics package for the unskilled and at first I thought it was being taken lightly. Now the thread seems to be a meeting place for making Dreams Come True.
Forgive me for popping bubbles.
Any character worth having in any game will be the character designed from scratch from those with Talent.
Those same people with artistic talent can learn to use a graphics package they feel most comfortable learning to use.
With enough practice that artist can forge a future in the community or even the world if they choose to.
The days of "cookie-cutter" graphics are long gone.. they went out with Pheonix and Pac-Man in the '80s.

Nowadays, it's Artist eat Artist and the best ones stand out while the others fall to the way side.
So again I am sorry for the reality-check.

#20 A great tool can't take the place of a talented artist, just like a great tool can't take the place of a talented programmer.

But, tools are constantly being developed to help non-programmers create games.

Take TGB as an example. Sure, you might have to program a little, but as more behaviors are created, the less programming is required.

The same is true of artist tools. The problem in the past has been that artists are creating one-off non-reusable works of art...

Take MakeHuman, Daz, Poser, Bryce and a few other tools as an example on the content side... although these tools aren't geared towards creating games, the concept isn't revolutionary.

All it takes is someone willing to take the idea of these tools and tailor them for game development.

It's happening now, and I know of at least two companies that are pursuing the development of tools that will give John and most non-artist Indie and hobby game developers exactly what they're wanting.

Now, granted, without an artist feeding the tool, the tool is worthless, but that's not what we're seeing.

The artists create the next generation content packs that go along with these new tools, and the non-artists can use them to create custom content for their games.

So much for the reality check... the days of non-innovative, limited thinking are gone.