3d Human Scans for Indie Games

3D Human Scans For Indie Games:

3D human scans are most commonly used in AAA games and Indie Game developers can finally have same access to this amazing technology!

There are two ways that I can think of right of the bat how attached we get to our ingame personas. The first one is on a purely emotional level and the second one is the visual level. We tend to identify, miror and at times imagine experiencing the same emotions as our ingame avatars experience.

Even though game characters in game worlds are usually split into 2 categories: Player characters and Non-player characters(NPC); yet we interact with NPCs just like we would with real people in the real world. We may sometimes get so tied up with the personas of digital avatars that the distinction between real and virtual completely breaks down.

The reason for the blurring of the border between real and virtual humans is that the technology enables us to simulate digital characters with much better precision. Literally, everything that real humans do, 3d humans may be able to simulate, provided that the machine that is running the simulation is capable of such overheads.

3D human scans can be further improved by adding more layers:

• 3d capture of skin geometry along with skin texture;
• advanced body and facial rigging pipeline;
• bone placement along with conditional skin deformation logic;
• muscle and fat layer simulation;
• cloth;
• hair;
• skin translucency.

As you can see, 3d human scans are only a part of the equasion and the full simulation of a person requires much more work, but at least this work can be based on real data of real people. And, even though the overhead is still there and mobile devices may not be able to provide enough power to have properly simulated 3d avatars in mobile and VR games, this will eventually change. Therefore it is essential that steps are taken to make your games future-proof through the use of aforementioned best practices.

…