Mirror Madness

Hello all!

So another blog about the Soccer Euro game! Last time my brother Michael was talking about a keeper who he programmed and all. Well, I am going to talk a bit about how I made him, the model, rigging and the animations.
A simple trick to get things easy done, is to mirror stuff: the mesh, the rig and yes, the animation. Why model stuff twice and get it correctly symmetrical if u can copy the stuff of one side?

What I did with the keeper model is, I made one half of his total body and mirrored it. With a simple tool in 3ds Max it welds the two meshes instantly.

Well, after the mesh is done and the unwrap is completed we’re going to start with rigging the model. So we’re going to make the model ready for animation. For rigging a model I use the skin modifier in 3ds Max. I will assign certain vertexes to the bones I want, so if I have a right hand bone I’ll assign all the vertexes of the right hand to this bone. Same for the right arm, legs, etc, etc.
Also for this step I rigged only one half of my model and mirrored it. For this there is a handy tool in 3ds Max skin modifier.

After this we’re going to start to animate the model. I had to make several animations for the keeper: an Idle, dive to the left animation, dive to the right animation, dive high left animation, dive high right animation, etc. Again, I can mirror some animations. Why make different animations for opposite sides? So what I did was: I made the left animation first, after this I needed this animation as well for the right side, but I want it to be exactly the same as my left one. Again I used a mirror tool to mirror my animation. And now my keeper also dived to the right side, similar to the left side animation.

Thats all for now!

Hails,
Eugène