A little about me… I’ve been (web) programming since 1998 and started with Unity/Unreal about 8 years ago. Most of my time was with unreal but I’ve grown frustrated with the poor design patterns for implementing basic features so I’ve swapped to Godot to try it out for one of my games. I’m really enjoying it and have decided to start over my other games with it! The massive performance increase and flexible design patterns are a huge bonus for me. I have yet to release a game outside my friends circle, but I feel it’s time to try put something out in the world for people to (hopefully) enjoy.
I’ve done 3d modelling / animation since around the same time I started programming but haven’t touched it in a few years and to be honest, I just don’t have the time or energy to put into it right now as I have my own family and a full time job… So I only spend 2-3 hours a night working on a single feature at a time.
I have never asked for help from a community before but I fear I’ll be working on this forever if I don’t get some sort of helping hand. I have 2 (simple enough) characters in A poses front/side/back ready to be modeled and rigged. Once that’s done I can take it from there as I will be chopping and changing animations. I’m wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of somewhere to look for help with 3d modelling and rigging? I’m quite positive there are people out there that would offer up their services free of charge to be part of a project but those people deserve to have a release date for a game, which is something I cannot offer up right now as this is a hobby project. Even if 90% of this game is complete, my time is limited to work on this. So I would have to give some sort of payment.
If this was any other web technology I would know where to look but honestly, I haven’t a clue where to look for help with modeling/rigging/animation. I don’t consider myself a game developer and its a scene I’m unfamiliar with other than actually playing games.
I used Mixamo before and it was perfect for animation at this point of my game. However, for some reason it won’t let me log in anymore. I thought that the service was discontinued or something? Are people still using this? It would really save a lot of time for me if this still worked
I always make my own armature in blender and I also add padded bones: meaning
Add bones to the clothing in tactical places like under the arm or bottom of the clothes
plus make sure the are connected offset.
This will help a lot when weight painting or doing the first initial weight paint automatic.
I usually rig a IK for the ankles and legs and control bone, so I can make my character crouch
down and I also keyframe the actual visual key of pos,scale,rot…. then disable the IK after baking.
I learned a lot by doing courses from GameDev.tv. They have a ton of Blender courses by Grant Abbitt and he is amazing. He teaches you everything you need to know about Blender, the art, and the tools and reinforces the learning. I’ve done a number of courses from him and own even more I haven’t gotten to yet.
Bonus to doing their courses: They have people who will answer questions on the boards as you go, and they have support boards and a community all doing the same stuff you are doing.
Also, while they don’t have any now, Humble Biundle often has packages from different places in 3D modeling, rigging, etc. That’s how I originally found GameDev.tv (and got a bunch of their courses cheap.) I’ve also enjoyed GameDev.tv’s Godot courses, though they are clearly not experts in the Godot way. Still I learned a lot.
An alternative to Mixamo is Mesh2Motion, you don’t need an account. You can rig your character or animals there and there are some animations too.
@dragonforge-dev already mentioned GameDev.tv and Grant Abbit, and the courses are really great! But paid.
On his YouTube channel there are many videos for modelling different things in different styles, for free. https://www.youtube.com/@grabbitt