A little diversion

I'm going to take a small step back for a moment to talk about what makes good deformation in a character, and what a technical artists' role is to get those results.  The deformation skeleton and weighting are only half of the solution in getting a mesh to move, we also have to closely consider the model and the animation.  When setting up a character we need to keep a critical artistic eye on both of these areas.  The first thing I do when setting up a model is look at the joint placement and topology and find the flaws in a mesh that won't deform right.  If I can fix problems without aesthetically changing the model I'll do it, if not I'll find the character artist and make a request to get it changed.  I'd say 9/10 times the changes are minor and plenty easy to change on our own.  Same goes with animation, there are times where animations or in game driven systems will put your character into impossible positions that break the weighting.  Sometimes the animation needs to be looked at and not the weighting to fix the problem.

One of the most important skills of a technical artist is communication.  It can sound a little cheesey but our job is to combine the technical side of game development with the artistic side and we need a good rapport with programmers and artists to do that   Sometimes this means requesting model and animation changes, other times it means talking with animation or game engineers to solve a problem or get a new feature.  It's when we keep communication open between departments that we find the best results.

It's this iteration and communication that lets us effectively do our jobs, and without it quality will always suffer.  Next weekend I'll have my post up about what it means to look at joint placement and topology and how I set up their relationships to get the best deformation that I can.