A character is a combination of geometry data that is attached to a predefined skeletal hierarchy. Examples include human bodies, aquatic animals, aliens, horses, and ropes. In the following examples, we will be dealing with humans, but keep in mind that most of these concepts can be applied to other types of animated assets as well.
Animated characters are integral to any game. Whenever you want to have realistic-looking movement, you need to be able to skin the asset's mesh to a skeleton. Once the mesh has been skinned, it can be exported to engine as a .chr. There is also a second format used mostly in vehicles or rigid body assets called .cga.
There are four important steps involved in preparing and animating your character from CryENGINE 3:
- Create a character and export a
.chrfile. - Enter the character's information into the
.cbafile. - Animate the character and export a
.caffile. - Add the exported
.caffile to the character.chrparamsfile.
We will follow this workflow over the next few examples.
When creating character assets for CryENGINE, they are typically saved to two or even three separate scene or .max files:
- The first file contains the main character.
- The second file contains the first LOD or level of detail, explained further below, of the character as well as the ragdoll physics mesh.
- The third file is optional because it usually contains just the head of the character. The head is separated as it makes it easier to edit and animate independently from the rest of the character.
Before we begin, some important things to note about the geometry used for the characters for CryENGINE are:
- The characters must be facing forward on the Y+ axis in 3ds Max
- The skinned geometry must have no transformations applied, and its pivot should be set to origin or
0,0,0
As there are many tutorials available online and elsewhere for character modeling and texturing, we will not go into depth on the actual process of modeling the character. Rather, we will learn to manipulate the example SDK character and explore how we can use this to create our own characters and animations.