developing low poly characters

[FaceMask]

I have been playing around with MakeHuman for awhile now, but I am having a little difficulty understanding which way would work best for my project. Basically I am interested in developing a video game, and I am trying to set a goal for my characters to be limited to 2k. I know I can use the proxy character, which helps, but the clothes are what blows my goal way off the chart. As a matter of fact, some of the clothes by themselves are over 1k, maybe even closer to 2k. I see that editing the character in Blender to cut down some the poly's only makes things worse and can even break the linkage with the shapekeys and armature. I am wondering if anyone has been successful with this challenge and could explain what you have done as a workaround.

[joepal]

My guess is most automated means of reducing the poly count post-export will either be disappointing in regards to quality, or destructive. It is not unlikely you would have to take the long path around to get the results you want.

The long path would constitute:

• Download the clothes you want.
• Find the .obj file among the downloaded files
• Install MakeTarget and MakeClothes for blender
• Load the appropriate toon via MakeClothes in blender (you might have to ask the clothes' author which base mesh was used, but you could guess from the usage: It'll probably be "female with helpers" for large clothes for example)
• Import the .obj file from the clothes
• Create a new piece of clothing by either:
• - Reducing the poly count by automated or manual means, while taking care that the end result is quad only
• - Or do a manual retopo, using for example this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sfA_yhMq0Q
• Use the MakeClothes standard procedure for producing a new clothes asset

The manual retopo approach will most likely produce the best mesh, but will not preserve UV (meaning textures and normal maps won't survive), while an automatically reduced poly count might preserve the UV but result in a messy mesh.

Anyway, the long approach described here risk being somewhat tedious, but is also the most stable. It means you will end up with low-poly clothing assets which can then be re-used for several toons and void future needs for doing destructive operations on meshes post-export.

Relevant read if you need to perform automatic poly reduction: https://blender.stackexchange.com/quest ... g-decimate

[RobBaer]

You may find this tutorial very useful for developing a workflow. It is Blender-centric, but also considers meshlab for the decimate effort, and it covers explicitly using normal maps to fake geometry. His character is not a MakeHuman character, but he makes an impressive case for being able to enormously reduce poly-count with minimal destruction of quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApzVWuPa4A4

[FaceMask]

Thank you both for the help. However, I could never get anything good out of MakeClothes. i have watched the video tutorial on MakeClothes written by VScorpianC, but her tutorial did not go over how to properly decimate clothing without causing any distortion. In fact, she even had mentioned that you do not want to make any drastic changes or it can produce spikes, which that is what was happening to me. So besides the videos above, which discusses decimating or retopo a mesh in general, are there any other things I should follow, such as is it better to decimate an edge loop as oppose to merging or collapsing vertices together?

[blindsaypatten]

I thought I might learn something by looking at this so I played around some with decimate. My first observation was that decimate produces non-quad faces so I doubt that you will be able take the decimated clothing back to MakeHuman through MakeClothes. After applying a decimate to the clothing it seemed to still follow the armature without problem, but with a lot of skin break-throughs. After deleting the body faces that should be hidden under the clothes everything seemed to be okay, although overlaps near the edges are a possibility. The remove body faces under clothing function leaves more body mesh when used with the proxy so I deleted a bunch manually.

So, give this a try:
1) create your character in MH using the low poly proxy, low poly eyes, and adding clothes etc.
2) export from MH and import into Blender
3) select the clothing and add the decimate modifier, decimate it to desired extent, apply the decimate modifier
4) delete as much of the hidden body as possible, including adding loop cuts to be able to trim back polygons
5) tweak the clothing mesh to avoid remaining body mesh, subdivide faces as necessary, extend edges of clothing into the body mesh if desired
6) use in Blender or export from Blender in your desired format

I would be tempted to look into using image textures to create the clothing directly on the body, but then you could use any old low poly mesh.

Here's Suit06 decimated down to 600 polygons:

[FaceMask]

blindsaypatten, you cannot decimate, manually delete, or add vertices to a MakeHuman character that has shapekeys, which is a crucial part for my project. It is these shapekeys that controls the facial animation, and it is a life saver due to the fact that there are so many facial expressions to create. Also, you cannot load facial keys after modifying the character, as the shapekeys are made from the base character. Otherwise I would not be using MakeHuman as much. However, thanks for trying.

[blindsaypatten]

blindsaypatten, you cannot decimate, manually delete, or add vertices to a MakeHuman character that has shapekeys, which is a crucial part for my project. It is these shapekeys that controls the facial animation, and it is a life saver due to the fact that there are so many facial expressions to create. Also, you cannot load facial keys after modifying the character, as the shapekeys are made from the base character. Otherwise I would not be using MakeHuman as much. However, thanks for trying.

I wasn't decimating the body mesh, just the clothing. It may have looked like it because I used the Proxy 741 topology. It's rather crude but with a goal of 2,000 faces Male1591 only leaves 409 for all the clothing.

I did modify the body mesh in order to prevent skin poke-throughs, but you could probably just move the body mesh away from the clothing instead.

Could you clarify what body mesh you are using?

[FaceMask]

Could you clarify what body mesh you are using?

I forget the exact count but it is the the female version of the male 1591. However, that is not the problem. I believe Unreal Engine 4 requires characters as a single mesh, and when I join the shirt to the body in Blender, it changes the vertex order, which messes up the shapekeys. OTOH, I have not tried the Unreal Engine Combine meshes on import. So I am not sure if that would cause problems as well.