Simple game character design Part 1

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Simple game character design Part 1

So this will be a series of articles following my trials creating a simple character driven 3D game in Flash using Away3D.

I have already created a human like character which I have discussed in a previous article (One giant leap for beankind. 3D Walking character using Away3D) so I decided to try my hand with a completely different type of character.

Wark!

For those of you who are fans of the final fantasy series of games, you will recognise the cute yellow bird pictured as a Chocobo, the mythical feathered mount popular in the series. In this series of articles I will be modelling, animating and using a chocobo character in a simple 3D game platform. My goals are to allow the chocobo to run, jump and interact with objects and characters within the game environment. This will be quite a large project and this is the reason for cutting it into numerous articles. Hopefully by the end we will be left with the beginning stages of an interesting flash game and will also have learnt a lot along the way... Here we go!

Step 1: Modelling the chocobo

The first step to modelling a 3D character is to sketch yourself a reference image of your character. When modeling for flash, you need to keep the shapes as simple as possible while also keeping your vertex count down. Pictured below is my reference image for my model. While angular and basic, the overall shape of the chocobo is still achieved. From the ref image, points and faces are manipulated in your 3D software until your basic character shape is ready.

3dchoc

Step 2: Texturing the chocobo

I have been over this step in a few of my previous studies so I won't fiddle more on the subject here. Basically the texture co-ordinates are exported from your 3D software program and brought into your image editing software where you can paint your texture onto your template. Once the texture is complete, it can be applied to your model within your 3D app, or in our case directly in Flash.

Step 3: Test in Flash

Once you have reached this stage (which took me about 4 - 5 hours) you are ready to get your model into flash to check for any display errors in your model or texture. This is very important as once you begin animating, fixing model errors in flash becomes a nightmare. To quickly test your model for Flash readyness, and also to quickly export in the correct format I use a program called Prefab (www.closier.nl/prefab/). It is free and will enable "non-coder" designers to get their models into Flash quickly.

That is the end of this part. In the next part we will be looking into animation. For this model we will animate four different sequences for our chocobo (Walk, Run, jump and some kind of animation for it's idle state) which will eventually be controlled by the user's key presses which will be the topic of Part 3.

Until then.

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