How do you create an avatar system within a game?

Pipelines
1

Hey all,

Only really posted a few times here and Im not much of an experienced rigger, but I was hoping to pick a few brains.

At work I’ve been tasked with seeing if an avatar system is plausible for us. By avatar system, I don’t mean interchangable clothing. That is without a doubt going to happen. What I mean is the advanced stuff, like changing peoples height and body weight (think character creation within an mmo). I haven’t really done anything scripting when it comes to rigging. Just basic ik/fk setups. But with this new project coming up, I have some time to learn some more advanced techniques, which I`m actually really looking forward to.

What Ive seen in other engines is theyll use blendshapes for the fat/thin versions, then just blend in and out of them. Height, i`m really not sure about. I know I could just do a simple universal scale of the rig, but that would affect everything, so the avatar would always been the same proportions, just a different height. If that’s what it comes down to, we’ve already agreed that that’s fine, but I would much rather have something a little more advanced, if I could swing it.

So here I am, asking you all for help. Is there any place that has good resources for this sort of stuff? Where do I even start to figure it all out? Are there certain rigging terms used for this sort of thing that you could tell me so I could google them a little better?

Honestly, any help you can provide, I will greatly appreciate. Admittedly, it’s currently over my head, but I’m not done kicking yet.

Thanks

Stefan

2

A lot of it depends on 1) How are the assets going to be exported – what sorts of tools programmer support you’ll have for getting your assets from your application into your engine, and 2) What sorts of game programmer support you have for advanced stuff. Are you going to have any sort of engine-side animation retargeting? Scaling in engine? Does your export format or game engine support non-uniform scaling? It’s a conversation that has to take place across many disciplines.

We have a pretty advanced customization system here at ZOS (we are working on an MMO, after all). But it does have some limitations on the animation side, and some self-imposed limitations to reduce the amount of work we need to do so we can ship this century. We have a “rig” where the character artists sculpt the different races/physiques/face shapes with animated controls, each frame is a different shape. The exporter pulls the customization skeleton, customization meshes, animation skeleton, and 2 separate sets of skinning data all together into a single file for each gender. Then there are some aliens that live in our engine that make this all work.