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UE3 Home > Character Artist

Character Artist

Populating the world with convincing and interesting looking characters is the job of the character artist. This has always been a challenging job within the realm of game development as organic shapes are much more difficult to reproduce with the type of fidelity desired. Through the use of features such as normal mapping and levels of detail, character artists are able to put a great deal of detail into the characters they produce while not stressing the hardware and hurting performance.

Unreal Engine 3 supports many features that make creating amazing characters possible and provides the tools necessary to make getting those characters into the engine as painless as possible.

FBX Skeletal Mesh Pipeline

Technical documentation and tutorials over using the FBX pipeline to create and import skeletal meshes into UE3.

Getting Started Topics

Getting Started: Content Creation - First steps for creating content for UE3.
Design Workflow - Overview of Epic's internal design workflow.

Content Creation Topics

Creating Models - Explanation of the art assets needed for creating models for UE3.
FBX Skeletal Mesh Pipeline - Guide on importing skeletal meshes using the FBX format.
FBX Morph Target Pipeline - Transferring morph targets from 3D applications to Unreal Editor.
Importing Skeletal Mesh Level of Detail - How to import and use skeletal mesh LODs.
Morph Targets - How to create vertex animated states for skeletal meshes.
Translucent Hair Sorting - Sorting of triangles to resolve issues in translucent hair rendering.
ActorX - ActorX is tool for exporting to the PSK format, which Unreal Editor can then import.
Creating Textures - Tips for creating textures for use with normal mapped materials.
Importing Texture Tutorial - How to get textures into Unreal Engine 3.
Creating Normal Maps - Practical advice and resources for creating normal maps.
Creating Shade Maps - Guide on creating shade maps using 3dsMax.
PhAT User Guide - Setting up rigid body physics for Skeletal Meshes.

Mobile Topics

Designing Content for Mobile - Tips and tricks for designing content to run on mobile devices.
Mobile Materials - Reference manual for creating mobile materials.
Mobile Textures - Information dealing with textures on mobile devices.