The Character Rig

The Basic Character Rig

The image below, shows 'Joe' in his most primal form - his rig.  I'm using the basic Character Studio rig for him, including fingers etc.  Depending on the level of detail that you require with your characters, you may want to forgoe the fingers potentially - it's up to you.  Many games simply use a simple 'mitt' hand rig - which is definitely easier to setup.

The Rig as shown above has 43 bones, which gives me a few extras that I will be using in the future to rig up the Head area of the character for facial animation.  You could also have pony tail bones etc as well, which can be controlled by the realtime physics engine potentially.

You can also combine / add custom bones to your characters if desired, using standard 'Max Bones'.  Again, there is no real limit as to how your character is setup - GameCore doesn't know or care about the Rig itself, everything is 100% up to you.

Note that I'm NOT showing you a detailed breakdown of every single bone in his Rig, specifically because it doesn't actually matter - setup your characters how YOU want them to be setup, GameCore will handle them irregardless.  The important details lie in how the animations themselves are setup, which we'll begin covering shortly.

The 'Anim Base' Model

Something that you can do to streamline your animation development, irregardless of which animation package that you are using (Milkshape, Max, etc), speed up the export process (and speed up object loading during development) is to create a separate version of your character model (I typically call them the 'AnimBase.max' version) - which is basically the character MINUS all of the actual meshes themselves.  I literally do a 'file-save as' and then delete the meshes from the AnimBase version of the model.  This speeds up Max quite a bit while I'm animating, and when you export the animations, they will be nice and small (since the mesh component of the model is ignored).

For example, 'Joe', after export is about 11 Mb as an FBX model.  Each of his animations are roughly 250kb each. 

Note: The final 'compiled' BVO object that GameCore cache's and loads, including his dozens of animations, is currently less than 9Mb, including the dozens of meshes and animations.