[Duion]

Do whatever you want, I'm just commenting what I think is wrong.

I also don't think there is such thing as an inherent skillset, you can learn anything if you want to, given a certain amount of base intelligence, which I assume exists in most people here.

The biggest time waster is probably, if you don't have a professional to tell you how things are done correctly, since then you spend much time doing the wrong things until you find the right way, while it would be much easier to do things right from the start.

@ Jason Campbell
For example I used your shotgun model in Uebergame, since I wanted to save me time: https://opengameart.org/content/semi-au ... h-magazine
Later I figured out that the textures were all broken so I removed them and use plain colors and the mesh was not the best as well, that was in 2016 and now I see that you still do textures wrong. I could give you people countless other examples, where I thought I was clever to use some stuff someone already made, but in the end it turned out that it was broken in some way and I had to fix it leaving me with a not so optimal solution and not having saved me much time.
It is not that your tutorial here in general is bad, indeed it is pretty good and helpful, but it really annoys me if I see bad practices and things that are not thought through over and over again.

[Jason Campbell]

I didn't do any textures for this. So MakeHuman exports textures that are broken? I'm confused. Bottom line, this saves me a ton of time. It doesn't for you and that is fine, as I said don't use it. Putting this together was a huge pain. It may seem pretty simple. If it really bothers you this much, perhaps you should put something together and teach others better practices. It would be great.

[Duion]

The textures are not broken, but you should not have 10x 2k or even 4k textures for one character, especially not duplicated. Makehuman is not made to export game ready characters, you eventually have to merge meshes, textures etc.

I already put something together and therefore show how to make it right, but I did not release my character yet, since I was not fully done, I'm kind of a perfectionist there. Even the default assets roughly show you how it is done.

[Jason Campbell]

I've been attempting to learn baking textures but it always screws up. The unwrap goes well and once I seemed to get the new uvmap working but the textures looked like crap. Then I couldn't replicate that. It's maddening. I haven't given in but just think of this as a thread where we share what we learn. It doesn't help to say that, for instance, you don't believe in using lod textures. That's great but how do you have a second detail use the same materials as the higher detail. Helping with that would be awesome. I am trying to learn and if I find the answer, I'll share it and update this thread.

[Duion]

Well the lazy method is to press auto unwrap and bake the textures, done, may not look so nice, but it will be efficient and have good performance and will not teach people to do bad practices.
The reason to have LOD textures is to have less textures and texture size on LOD levels, but you also increase the number of total textures in the game, which probably makes performance worse again, so it is a tradeoff.
The default tree in Torque has that, it has 2x 1k textures for highest LOD and 1x 512x1024 I think for lower LOD, so it reduces draw calls by one. Additionally you can remove things like normal and specular maps for LOD levels. But I hardly ever have seen anyone doing that method, so maybe it is not so useful at all.

[Jason Campbell]

I was able to bake the textures. I could only get it to do it well with the imported MakeHuman model. One problem is the hair lacks the transparency so it doesn't look as good. I used the alpha in materials editor to make it a little bit better. One could leave the hair and eyebrows out of the bake if you wanted a better look. The character needs work but it is single texture. I was able to figure out how to share materials too. Take a look if you like.

Download: Blend and Character
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cEF6M ... KV2Akv8O38

These were the most helpful to get the baking and texture working

Bake a Texture In Blender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7bjdWu9OGs

Copy material to another object?
https://blender.stackexchange.com/quest ... her-object

[Duion]

Now you are getting there, second major design flaw now would be the unclean mesh. A good artist makes symmetrical meshes that are all quads, because they can be subdivided or reduced easily.

The hair was also a problem for me, so I made a character that did not have exposed hair. The problem with the hair is that you can have only either solid textures or transparent ones. What I would do is to bake the hair to a solid shape and/or use some alpha treshhold texture or use a second texture that has regular transparency.

Regarding the ugly mesh, what I did was to remove all of the body that was not exposed and connected the remaining skin with the clothes directly, so that there were no holes, however this was much work and if you want to save you work, I would just leave the whole body intact and overlay the clothes, in which case it may make sense to have a different atlas texture for the clothes.

[XIXWYRMEXIX]

Adding to this is good news. I was finally able to transfer the weights of the character I created, did not get them into torque with animations yet but I was really trying to get the weight thing to work before I worried about that. I can and have done that and added and taken away animations before in torque (with compatible characters) so I am not very worried about that. Making the textures and the meshes better and improved is great. Can't wait to do this aspect. Good job Jason and thanks for the contributions Duion, whether or not you "like" or "approve" this as a creative pipeline process, this does in fact help others. Not all creative processes are the same for all people. Not all game development pipelines are the same.

[Duion]

It is not wrong in general, but more of a botch job. Yes it works, but my criticism was that you may run into different problems later if you do it that way.

The default assets especially the soldier have caused so much trouble by now, I would recommend deleting it and giving people a dummy figure they have to implement themselves, this was actually part of the plan when I was on the steering committee when it still existed, but the person signing up for that task left like always.