[pronlover723]

I'm curious how they went from character sheet to fully rigged model.

It sounds like they hand created the model, and hand rigged it, and the entire process took 18 hours (entire meaning from 0 to game proto) so building the model, applying UVs, and rigging, was some sub-portion of that 18 hours

Does that fit other people's experience of how long it generally takes someone to model, UV map, and rig a character?

edit: If it's not clear, it sounds like it took 4-6 hours to model, map, rig. Since they still had to spend time generating the character sheet, generating the city and alley, and turning it all into a playable prototype in that same 18 hours

[nineteen999]

By skipping straight to a low-poly model rather than sculpting a high-poly model and then retopologizing, the author saved an immense amount of time. UV mapping I expect they wouldn't have saved much time. The AI texture maps (complete with baked in shadows and lighting that wouldn't work in all lighting conditions) saved them an immense amount of time, but doesn't include the normal mapping step that would usually occur with the high/poly low workflow. Of course there are some artifacts there but the end result is really good for a prototype for a low budget indie game.

Using Mixamo once again saves an huge amount of time over hand rigging the mesh and instantly gives you access to a large library of animations that can be projected onto the Mixamo rig.

This is a very clever use of the available tools by very experienced character artist in my opinion. Your average HN reader is not going to be able to achieve this in 4, 18 hours or otherwise due to simply not having the required skillset to get from one end of the workflow to the other. Kudos to the author.

[hacker_9]

It does, once you have the character sheet, you put these together in blender and use them as reference for the 3d model, so everything comes out in proportion and its just grind really to place the vertices.

The rigging + animation is done by mixamo's AI so just touch up after.

He had to do a UV unwrap and then align the textures to this, this is time consuming just because it requires thinking about where to split the 3d model, to place the seams, then to fit it all in a texture, where you have to think about how much space to give each texture (more space = more quality). And then map the texture into this space too. This is a known pain in the 3d modelling for decades and no doubt AI will solve this in the next decade.