Lots of animated Minecraft type characters on mobile

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Hi, I have this idea for a game involving a lot of characters in a level, but these characters would be fairly simple in style, basic shapes like a Minecraft character. I was following tutorials on blender on making a character like this that can be animated (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBVnIfcoBhY - check 15 seconds into the video).

After a quick read, I read there was a number of things to be careful about for mobile, like having no more than 30 bones per character, this tutorial ends up having around 45. I plan to make my characters even simpler than this when it comes to the face, like having a few simple planes for the eyes and mouth, but even those I want to be able to animate in some way, but is 45 bones too many? I want to be able to bend the arms and legs and stuff.

The model in the tutorial had 1007 faces, with 2032 tris, though I feel I can easily cut down on that. I plan to have one texture per character.

Even though I want to populate the area with a lot of characters, that are also animated, like walking, I intend to reuse a lot of the same characters, with some just having a different texture. For the areas themselves, they'll be as low poly as I can make. Also not every character will need to be on screen at once.

I'm still new to game development, and Unity, and was going to start creating some of these characters, am I fine to create what was shown in the video? Or is there anything I should think about when creating these models?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

That has lots of bones because it is using a face rig which you really do not need for a game. Looks like that is more aimed at creating a Minecraft character for animations rather than using in a game. The mesh is also far more highly tessellated than it needs to be for a simple game.

The Minecraft character could be made using one bone in each arm, one in each leg, one for the neck and connecting them all to a single spine in the torso, perhaps a pelvis too just to act as a controller. Likewise with 6 faces / 12 tris for each. So... 6 or 7 bones and 72 tris. Frankly it is simple enough that you could animate it without bones entirely and just rotate the transform of each limb. Any facial animation you did want you would do by animating the texture applied to it.

If you want the arms and legs to bend on the elbows and knees then add an extra bone each. Still a long way from 30.

I would not use that video as a guide for how to make a Minecraft style character for use in a game as it is clearly not intended for that. Facial animation is significantly more complicated than animating a character's basic movements and likely going to be a waste of time for you as it will be far too costly to use if you have lots of characters in a level.

Lots of animated Minecraft type characters on mobile

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