Turniper
6d ago
Yeah, that's a really hard goal. It's only gonna get worse once you add blend shapes, equipment, and attachment points. You'll start to find that you really need to have unified skeletons, because if you don't, you'll need new copies of models for everything. IE you'll need to reskin and possibly even mess with the low-poly mesh for every pair of pants x every base mesh you build. If your dwarves/elves are just humans modified with aggressive blend shapes though, you only need pants for men and pants for women. It's definitely a cool idea, but I tend to think it's way too big for a single person to accomplish, not one of the low hanging fruit for procedural generation, like terrain or animating a spider.
Turniper
18d ago
There's definitely other processes that work. I know some people who do manage to get books done by ruminating over the story in their head for ages and only writing when inspiration strikes them. Met one at a party last night actually, was an interesting talk. But they're the sort of people who actually are struck by inspiration regularly. For the rest of us, there is daily discipline.
Whatever one's process is, if it does not result in words on a page month over month, it will never result in books.
Turniper
18d ago
By generate procedurally, do you mean use unreal's tools like metahuman and just export a model? Or like, write code to build you a model? If the former, yeah, I would definitely recommend using some sort of preexisting humanoid avatar model that has all your blend shapes and replacement slots configured, then just building from that base. Building new dedicated humanoid characters is really an activity for people doing very art-driven projects with particular aesthetics. I personally work in Unity, so I just import UMA and that gives me good default humanoids out of the box that I can always replace with custom models later.
Blend shapes will allow you to mess with proportions. That's actually pretty easy, and the industry standard solution for stuff like scaling fat or muscle. The problem is that animations wont play nicely with blend shapes. If you increase the length of legs or forearms rather than scaling height uniformly, all your physical interaction animations begin to break. If you really want truly unique builds, you basically need to do VR style procedural IK animation for all your interactions.
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