I should probably add that I'm working on rounding up sponsors for prizes for the contests for the concept art. Clothing won't be such a big deal. I've been lurking around the modder forums for stuff like SIMS, Oblivion, etc. Most of those folks are more than willing to chip in for clothes and a lot of objects. Anything that won't be part of combat or game play should be ok.
Blender does a fantastic job with cloth by the way.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oO4129sA8KsNow the problem is creatures, people, and weapons. Since physics is a big part of this, I'm thinking that we need to be pretty careful. I really need to know how physics is going to affect the art before we get started.
I'ts not hard from an artist perspective. In short, they just need to build things in parts instead of monolithic objects. The parts are intended for assembly and disassembly, so things are built in seperate parts and connected at dummy nodes (called mount nodes in some engines). Rather than building a single sword model, you would build four models: pommel, handle, hilt and blade. The pommel would have at least one mount node, the handle and hilt two and the blade one. If you want to be able to impale someone with a blade, the artist may want to add a couple of mount points along its length.
Different engines have different naming conventions for the mount points. Torque is limited to 32 mount point names and uses
mount0 through
mount 31. For Multiverse, the dummies must be named
mvsock_XXXX; whatever you want with a leading mvsock_ namespace. IIRC, D3D allows freeform dummy node names.
I'll cook up a naming schema later this week. It will probably follow the Torque convention since that is the most restrictive. It would not be too hard to write a conversions script for the others.
