Texturing

So far with my game I've been representing characters with cubes, these cubes move around, shoot, and change colour when you enter their line of sight. But a big part of the game and something I see being one of the most complicated for me is graphics and animation. Because of this a desire to get the basic animating of characters and importing into the game has preyed on my mind.

Initially I was trying to use makehuman to make my game characters, it was fully rigged textures included and had a very open licensing agreement, yes it did make very high poly characters but I was sure in blender I could decrease the vertex count and optimise it. However I had a lot of problems trying to move the models into JMonkey, as you can see below:

This took a lot of work to get to, initially I started off with a fragment of torso with some random pixel clusters. I know of people who have apparently just exported, put into blender and imported into JMonkey with little trouble so I don't know if there's something I missed or they're using the nightly builds or an older version.

I was beginning to reach my wits end, at one point I half considered scrapping JMonkey and giving unity a shot. Luckily however I came into contact with unihuman ( http://goo.gl/OrTl7 ). I opened up the blend file, selected the model and pressed shift-f10. This unwraps the model to create a UV-Layout:

I exported this and whacked it into gimp where I painted it (albeit terribly). I then created a material and added a texture to it. The screenshot below shows the textured model along with the mapping settings. The texture is mapped to the UV layout because other wise the image file is laid onto the back and the rest of the model filled in with a solid colour:

I use the jmonkey blender imported and add the material file to the model programmatically, when the model is finished and animated I'll be able to use it for nearly every character and just provide a different texture file.

The finished result in the game world is:

As you can see the texture is a bit terrible (great art skills on my part), but I used to do a lot of photoshop and eventually I'll take the time to properly texture up the model. Right now I'm looking at animating the model either from scratch or using open source mocap data.

Overall I'm quite happy with this. It might be overly optimistic but I feel that characters are the hardest 40% of the art work, and they are a part that I have near enough got down.