Thwip wrote:Wain wrote:Thwip wrote:
Also, Qraljar, I did mean the mine spider! Sorry for not clarifying. When someone says 'skin', I immediately think of the texture as that's what I refer to as the skin for mesh models. The mesh itself also looks fine. I think the animation bone on the tip of the foot lost it's animation weighting somewhere along the line as the animation is running, save that one spot. That does absolutely mean the mesh weights are broken somewhere or not even placed properly. I still think it's a rig issue since the weight painting goes with the rig. Does it do that in it's idle animations as well? Or just the running/walking ones? I'd actually love to get a list set up with all the broken animations in game so we can tweet Chris R. about them and see if we can bring some attention to it.
Ahh, that explains it for me.
I always see it like this:
Polymodeling: creation of the basemesh
UV unwrapping: laying seams so the 3D mesh can be unwrapped and the 3D geometry can be projected onto a flat surface with different UV/texture islands so that a 2D painting program like Photoshop can paint the textures on a flat surface that can later be projected back onto the mesh.
(Although, as an aside, I think in this day and age, WoW's texture artists use something like 3D Coat, where they can paint directly on the mesh after unwrapping it and see how it looks, rather than going back and forth between Photoshop and 3ds Max/Maya)
Rigging: Creating the skeleton that will go with the mesh, the bones and according nubs.
Skinning: Painting the vertex weights to the appropriate bones of the rig/skeleton to get a smooth transition between several different body parts so animating it will look as good and natural as possible.
Animating: Self-explanatory.
Of course, you have several other practices, like sculpting for games where baking normal maps and retopologizing high poly meshes is common.
I get where you're coming from. A lot of people see rigging as creating the skeleton and painting the weights together, but I like to separate them, because having a good skeleton doesn't mean it immediately animated properly, that's where the vertex weights come into play (as you undoubtedly know), so I like to separate them as I do unwrapping and texturing. It's also because the modifier to paint the weights falls under the "skin" tab.
But those were just my 2 cents.
Quiv wrote:75% of people on official forums wrote:THSE LAZY DEVS WANT 2 KILL WOW UNSUBBED BLIZZ GG
Anyway....
One thing I am certainly guilty of is using terms like skin and model interchangeably when they probably shouldn't be. I guess the greater context of the conversation helps, but still I think its good to be accurate. Wish I could produce a visual guide of sorts to illustrate the difference between things like skin and model, even concepts like skeleton, rigging, and animations. There may be more!
The issue with skin and model often being seen by gamers as synonymous has mostly to do with how different models are called skins, by say, League of Legends, or Heroes of the Storm. In technical terms, they are, at the least, remodels, but "skin" as a consumer term for them has become so common that I can't really fault it.