Could someone please tell me where can I find the general rigging specifications such as bone count, bones per vertex, use of ik/fk (RP/CS solver), joint orientation, constraints (and what not) for various platforms. For instance, the difference in the specs when rigging for iPhone (Mobile), iPad (Tablet), PS Vita (Handheld) and PS3 (Console).
Many thanks, in advance for your time.
General specs? Wow, that’s a really broad question. Are you making a fighting game with only two characters on screen or do you need to be able to process 10x or 20x that amount of characters? Even on a single platform, you’re going to get a ton of variance depending on the requirements of your game.
Yes it really depends on the game you’re making… But I’ll get the ball rolling with some very vague guidelines we use when tackling iOS.
iOS devices use a GPU made by Imagination Technologies called PowerVR. This is important for two reasons, the first being they host a ton of tools for piping content to their GPU you’ll need to register but its well worth the 2-3 minutes it takes the second reason of course is knowing the tech.
So on to some guidelines I suppose…
Most of the time, you’ll want to limit max influences to three or less, we usually stick to two for iOS, and if you’re using the native PowerVR format .POD there is a influence limit of four.
Bone counts really just depend on the type of asset, but skinned weighted meshes are very expensive compared to static meshes, so less is more! Three things really matter here; Vertex count, Bone count, and influences per vertex. If you using .POD then bone batching comes in to play as well (which create drawcalls for each batch). So you’ll need to keep all these things in mind and try to balance them as best as you can.
We’ve done characters that have 20-40 bones and some more complex ones that had 120. (wings, tail, 4 legs, and a moving jaw, you get the idea…)
We have never use real-time IK solvers for any mobile games so far.
One last thing I’ll note is when we do an iOS title we almost always target all iOS devices so we always keep the bottom spec in mind which is the iPad 1 (because of its bad fillrate) iPhone 3GS would be next in line for our bottom spec… We usually don’t go lower to the discontinued phones.
Hope some of this helps.
[QUOTE=jjones;16192]General specs? Wow, that’s a really broad question. Are you making a fighting game with only two characters on screen or do you need to be able to process 10x or 20x that amount of characters? Even on a single platform, you’re going to get a ton of variance depending on the requirements of your game.[/QUOTE]
I was half expecting to see this kind of response. I was rigging stuff for various platforms for a part of my masters course and was after such details. The module has ended and I have submitted stuff, so no worries.
Thank you anyway.
[QUOTE=Kolgrima;16194]Yes it really depends on the game you’re making… But I’ll get the ball rolling with some very vague guidelines we use when tackling iOS.
iOS devices use a GPU made by Imagination Technologies called PowerVR. This is important for two reasons, the first being they host a ton of tools for piping content to their GPU you’ll need to register but its well worth the 2-3 minutes it takes the second reason of course is knowing the tech.
So on to some guidelines I suppose…
Most of the time, you’ll want to limit max influences to three or less, we usually stick to two for iOS, and if you’re using the native PowerVR format .POD there is a influence limit of four.
Bone counts really just depend on the type of asset, but skinned weighted meshes are very expensive compared to static meshes, so less is more! Three things really matter here; Vertex count, Bone count, and influences per vertex. If you using .POD then bone batching comes in to play as well (which create drawcalls for each batch). So you’ll need to keep all these things in mind and try to balance them as best as you can.
We’ve done characters that have 20-40 bones and some more complex ones that had 120. (wings, tail, 4 legs, and a moving jaw, you get the idea…)
We have never use real-time IK solvers for any mobile games so far.
One last thing I’ll note is when we do an iOS title we almost always target all iOS devices so we always keep the bottom spec in mind which is the iPad 1 (because of its bad fillrate) iPhone 3GS would be next in line for our bottom spec… We usually don’t go lower to the discontinued phones.
Hope some of this helps.[/QUOTE]
Thanks a lot :): I was just starting to rig a character for iphone and this piece of info came in handy.