Adding horses to a game world is not an easy thing to do. The sculpting, animating, and AI behaviours required to model a four legged creature are all more than twice as complex as for a biped. But the steppe simply would not be the same without mounted scouts and fiendish bandits so horses had to be done to make the world of Spice Road suitably fast and dangerous.
Getting the shape of a horse right is hard enough on its own without worrying about the topology of the Lo-Poly mesh so I started by drawing some simple primitives over a reference picture in Curvy 3D.
Building a Lo-Poly Horse using Sketch Based Modelling
Curvy lets you draw curves to define the outline of a primitive – so it is quite easy over a reference photo. It was easy to correct mistakes and tweak the model at this stage because each primitive is separate and controlled by the curves – there are no triangles, patches, sub-d to worry about.
I merged the primitives into a 40,000 tri model, I could have used a higher resolution if I wanted to take it into ZBrush and detail a Hi-Poly version, but this was headed in the other direction to a low poly count so I could render a good number on screen in a battle. I used MeshLab and Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation to produce the Lo-Poly version.
This was a fast route to a Lo-Poly model, but the essential question was could it animate? I added a skeleton rig and tried out a classic Muybridge walk cycle:
Adding a rider and hooking up some gallop, charge and destroy AI produced the first Cavalry battle on the Spice Road. I can’t wait to add some sabre weilding bandits into the mix!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matthew Boulden, Simon de Rivaz. Simon de Rivaz said: Send in the Cavalry – Adding Horses to Spice Road http://www.aartformgames.com/blog/2009/12/send-in-the-cavalry/ [...]