Depends on what you want to do. Work on world textures is usually (if you work with photo sources) only a series of different filters and such, while making textures for (complex) models needs more painting skills. But as before, 3D helps the tech artist a lot. Nowadays you can bake the AO (ambient selfshadowing) and get the texture features from a normal-map bake pretty easily, thus all paining that is often needed are the colors and color patterns. And that is rather easy to do ;)
I agree that Blender 2.5 is finally not bad for starting out anymore, but for modeling static meshes and rendering them Wings3D ist probably quicker to learn (since it has a really easy gui) and it is a good moddeling application in general:
But if you feel comfortable with Blender 2.5 stick to it, since in the long run it is for sure the more capable application (and once bmesh is integrated it might actually surpas Wings concerning mesh modeling).
I *think* as a more programmer/science focused guy you might have more luck with 3D art than pixel one. the latter really reqires you to have a sense for colors and such, while 3D art is relatively technical.
OSARE (search on this page) is a good example for this. The main artist does "programmers art" (his own description) but since it is all rendered from 3D meshes it actually looks quite good.
For sure a few nice tricks could be taken. I really like for example the idea used in the spider rig of having an IK controller that can be rotated and moved as usually, but when you scale it it rotates the knee (thus you don't have to swich selection when animating).
Otherwise, well here is an old 2.49 rig I build a long time ago:
One of the things OGA tries to acomplish is the standardisation of game art licenses, as there are only a few things worse than having to handle a thousand different media licenses in a bigger game project.
Thus unless the author agrees to put it under a standard license (and of couse OGA can have a link pointing back to his site as attribution) I would say keeping to the principles is better in this case.
Edit: But yes, maybe Bart can contact him and ask ;) the tileset is really nice.
So if I have a simple rig (I think older GPUs can support something like 30 bones) that "copy-rotates" a more advanced rig like the one above and only the former is weighted to the mesh, then the advanced rig never actually gets exported into a format like .md5?
In that case using spline ik and such shouldn't matter either right?
One technical question: Have you though about how the bones will export to a game format that includes skeletal animations?
I am still scratching my head regarding that issue (since I am really no expert on that)... You really don't want to have all the helper bones also exported, and things like spine IK will probably not be exported at all.
Maybe you will have to create a separate skeleton that is FK animated by following a rig like the one above...who knows. But I would be happy if someone could help me find a good solution.
"High pass" is a technical term for what the resynthesizer plugin does, don't ask me about details ;)
"low frequency" patterns are for example a single bigger dark area in the texture that when the texture is tiled is really visible as repeating with a low frequency and thus destroys the illusion of an "endless" texture.
Depends on what you want to do. Work on world textures is usually (if you work with photo sources) only a series of different filters and such, while making textures for (complex) models needs more painting skills. But as before, 3D helps the tech artist a lot. Nowadays you can bake the AO (ambient selfshadowing) and get the texture features from a normal-map bake pretty easily, thus all paining that is often needed are the colors and color patterns. And that is rather easy to do ;)
I agree that Blender 2.5 is finally not bad for starting out anymore, but for modeling static meshes and rendering them Wings3D ist probably quicker to learn (since it has a really easy gui) and it is a good moddeling application in general:
http://www.wings3d.com/
But if you feel comfortable with Blender 2.5 stick to it, since in the long run it is for sure the more capable application (and once bmesh is integrated it might actually surpas Wings concerning mesh modeling).
Additionally good sounds and music are often underrated in indi game design, but IMHO are probably almost the most important part of a game.
I *think* as a more programmer/science focused guy you might have more luck with 3D art than pixel one. the latter really reqires you to have a sense for colors and such, while 3D art is relatively technical.
OSARE (search on this page) is a good example for this. The main artist does "programmers art" (his own description) but since it is all rendered from 3D meshes it actually looks quite good.
Not an expert either, but from these free rigs (for Blender 2.5):
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=187051
For sure a few nice tricks could be taken. I really like for example the idea used in the spider rig of having an IK controller that can be rotated and moved as usually, but when you scale it it rotates the knee (thus you don't have to swich selection when animating).
Otherwise, well here is an old 2.49 rig I build a long time ago:
http://opengameart.org/content/blender-humanoid-rig
I guess it's not really good, but it's down to the basics, and the proportions are pretty good too I think.
One of the things OGA tries to acomplish is the standardisation of game art licenses, as there are only a few things worse than having to handle a thousand different media licenses in a bigger game project.
Thus unless the author agrees to put it under a standard license (and of couse OGA can have a link pointing back to his site as attribution) I would say keeping to the principles is better in this case.
Edit: But yes, maybe Bart can contact him and ask ;) the tileset is really nice.
Ahh ok that brings some light into the issue.
So if I have a simple rig (I think older GPUs can support something like 30 bones) that "copy-rotates" a more advanced rig like the one above and only the former is weighted to the mesh, then the advanced rig never actually gets exported into a format like .md5?
In that case using spline ik and such shouldn't matter either right?
One technical question: Have you though about how the bones will export to a game format that includes skeletal animations?
I am still scratching my head regarding that issue (since I am really no expert on that)... You really don't want to have all the helper bones also exported, and things like spine IK will probably not be exported at all.
Maybe you will have to create a separate skeleton that is FK animated by following a rig like the one above...who knows. But I would be happy if someone could help me find a good solution.
"High pass" is a technical term for what the resynthesizer plugin does, don't ask me about details ;)
"low frequency" patterns are for example a single bigger dark area in the texture that when the texture is tiled is really visible as repeating with a low frequency and thus destroys the illusion of an "endless" texture.
Naa, why? This could be of some use for other things. The resynthesizer plugin really butchers the actual texture information.
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