Creating Characters in a Virtual World

This is the second blog in my new series. I have decided to write a blog every two or three days. The reason I am doing this is that a blog is meant to be a "binary log" and as such it should be more oriented to capturing ideas as you have them. Doing it this way it is better in capturing the overall creative process. Of course, that assumes that I am being creative and I have a process :)

Lately, I have been playing with some new software I have bought. It is called Poser. It is a product that allows you to build and animate 3D Scenes. A 3D scene is made up of characters and props. This blog is an introduction to characters. You may hear me talk about Characters and Avatars in these blogs. They both represent a human (or sometimes an animal) in a 3D environment. The difference from my perspective is that a character is like a mannequin or puppet. It is something you pose and animate to look like it is dancing, walking, etc. An avatar is a representation of you in some context like a game. A product like Poser is single user and is intended to allow you to basically create 3D scenes to photograph or to animate and then create a movie or video. As such, the human models in the scene are called characters. In a virtual world game, like Second Life or Multiverse, you are in control of a human model and therefore it is called an avatar. If it is you in a world it is an avatar, if it is part of some staged scene it is a character. The first picture to the left is one of the "out of the box" characters in Poser named Simon.

In both cases, character and avatar, the underlying technology is the same. You create a mesh that has the shape of a human being. This can be very challenging in that the people are very aware of what human beings look like and therefore are very critical of how they look in a scene or game. I have created my own meshes that look like humans and originally bought Poser so that I could import my human model meshes to further work on them. Over the last couple of months, I have also started to work with the pre-built meshes that come with Poser in addition to the ones I built. The Poser meshes are very well done and Poser provides tools to easily modify their appearance. For basic human models, I will probably utilize the Poser meshes going forward and only use the ones I built for very unique shapes that Poser doesn't easily create.

After you have a mesh that looks like a human, you need to skin and rig it. What this means is that you basically create bones for the character. This skeleton controls how you pose the character. What you do is put the bones inside of the mesh. This is called rigging the skeleton. Then you identify what part of the mesh is controlled by what bones. This is called skinning because you are "attaching" skin to the skeleton by identifying the portions of the mesh that are affected by each bone. A given portion of the skin or mesh can be affected by more than one bone. This overlap is necessary to simulate human movement. I have both skinned and rigged meshes I created in Blender, as well as, used existing rigged and skinned characters that come with Poser. For posing and animation, you position the bones and not the mesh itself and because of the rigging and skinning the mesh moves along with the bones you position. The picture to the right is a mesh that I did from scratch using Blender and importing into Poser.

When you have your basic character in Poser, you can do many things with it. You can change the way it looks (make it fatter, skinnier, change skin color, change facial features, etc). You can dress it and attach things to it (i.e. a sword or golf club). You can pose it, animate it, change facial expressions and even make it talk. I will cover some of my adventures in these areas of using characters in Poser in future blogs. Also, check out my Avatars Gallery for pictures of characters I have created in Second Life.