Creating a character model

I've already made several human character models in the past that I used to evaluate game mechanics and whatnot, but I I decided that it's about time to get a functional and visually acceptable model working. It's kind of complicated to explain, hence the topic getting its own post.

Originally the character model was bare and lacked any clothes, so one of the first things I did to fix that was create pieces of clothing to attach to the player. The idea was simple: model pieces of clothing large enough to conceal the player's body and attach them to the player. It's kind of like drawing a solid black shirt over an equally black stick figure- the clothing hides the body. However, this technique was somewhat complicated because each article of clothing needed to be made up of multiple pieces. A shirt for example needed to be made up of five pieces: one part for the torso, one for the left forearm, one for the right forearm, one for the left lower arm, and one for the right lower arm. Why? Because the shirt pieces don't actually move on their own... they attach to each section of the player, the player moves, and the clothing pieces move based on what the player does.

Shorts modeled in Blender. It's made up of 3 pieces... one piece attaches to the player's hip and the other two to attach to each of the player's upper legs. The pieces are arranged so that they can be directly attached to the player's bone structure without needing their position changed.

I decided not to use the above technique because it was slow to model and align clothing pieces up to the player correctly. Instead, I tried using a different and slightly more complicated technique that involved the use of four different "actor" models - models that can be animated. The four actors are the player's shirt, the skin underneath the player's shirt, the player's pants, and the skin underneath the player's pants. It's one of those things that are better explained by a picture I suppose.

The model on the far left is the player's upper torso and is not used in the game. The middle model is that of the player's shirt and the on on the far right is its skin.

How the two upper body sections would appear in-game. Note that I chose the color scheme, the player is not actually an alien.

The player model as a combination of four actors.

So why four models? Well, actors can only be one color (the function of Panda3D that allows the creation of multicolored actors, egg-optchar, doesn't seem to work), so there's that. I also did not combine the skin actors together (the arms and legs) because if the player wanted to change from shorts to long pants in the game the changes involved could become complicated fairly quickly.

With the main body created, everything else the character needs can be simply attached to the body.

The head, gloves, and shoes when attached to the player. Once I find the facial features I created a while back I will add those on as well.