I had no idea procedural mesh and texture generation was so advanced !
This is nothing;
take a look at this for what you can achieve when you invest some serious time into it.
Sarevok wrote:Why don't the game industry use same techniques as you do to cut down time and costs ?
I'm using it on the birds and enemies for two reasons; because I'm not a very good 3D modeller (it really is easier for me to define cubic patches by hand than to use a 3D program to make them) and to keep the download size down. For the landscape it is a time saver even if you are a good 3D modeller, but I can only get away with it because the landscape details aren't critical to gameplay the way they are in an FPS or driving game.
Birds and these weird alien monsters can easily be generated from lathed sections glued onto each other. However a lot of game-relevant shapes are much harder to generate procedurally. In principle nearly any type of object can be created this way. However most games companies would rather just hire a crew of cheap, replacable 3D modellers to grind out a load of content, rather than take the high-risk option of hiring top-quality programmers and getting them to program a procedural shape grammar. Since most games have a relatively limited environment, the extra variety isn't a huge benefit, and in any case most creative directors are control freaks who don't like the idea of the player experience differing in any way from what the playtesters see.
Steady progress is being made though, mainly by the increasing sophistication of plug-in middleware.
Sarevok wrote:Basic attributes like height, color, general look are derived from your description. Then you change bits here and there to make him to look like a Stormtrooper, Replica, Overwatch etc.
Character customisation is usually implemented by a combination of two techniques; combining pre-made pieces (e.g. equipment) into a single character mesh at runtime, and extending the bones animation system to do things like facial feature customisation.
Hmm... is there a way to procedurally create meshes as complex as characters with the properties required for a gaming character?
Procedural generation of humans is an active research area. It's been used in movie CGI rendering applications, for large battle scenes. I'm not aware of any games that use a fully procedural approach, though several use animation bones to alter proportions and facial features (hence creating multiple characters from one mesh).