Hello everyone!

Today I will talk about clothing.  Unity has a fantastic add-on for characters, allow us to create characters of all shapes and sizes, a variety of skin colors, and customized facial features. Of course, hair styles and hair colors will also be customizable. Players will be able to log into the game, create their own customized character, and play with that character in the game.

However, this could create a challenge when making clothes for the game. Fortunately, Unity’s plug-in allows us to make clothing that will fit no matter the size of the body. So a muscular character could wear the same clothing as a thin character.  This makes it much easier for the artists to make numerous styles of clothing that will fit your character regardless of your customizations.

Clothing in Legends of Aryiure will focus on the mid-medieval period style for the most part, 12th century, give or take 50 years.  Since the game world is fictional and we have a variety of cultures, sometimes we will ignore this time frame and choose clothing that suits the culture.  Our typical European medieval styles will apply in cultures that dress similar to the Sala style.  Ashes, our test world, will take place in the Bloodlands, an area highly influenced by Sala’s conquest of the area.  It will also focus on regular people, peasants, farmers, and merchants of modest means.  The inhabitants of the small village are not wealthy and they do not dress like nobles.

I have begun modeling some examples of clothing. These are high poly models we will use as the base for the clothing. Using several methods, we will be lowering the polys and baking the wrinkles and creases onto the textures. Then we will sculpt and add features such as buckles, laces, etc. to the clothing.  As you can see below, the high poly models are simple, reflecting the simple dress of common people.  Each of these are bases for other designs which we will make by adding belts, changing sleeves, adding under-shirts and gowns, aprons, and other accessories to the clothing.  I will post future pictures so you can see the progress.

The white models you see are sculpts of the actual models we will be using in the game. The actual models are rigged and animated and currently running around in their underwear on our early test server.  Hopefully soon we will be able to show you the models in actual clothing!

Here are some conceptual pictures found on the web for the male base clothing.

Here are our high poly base models.  The colors are not textures but simply colored to make them easier to see against the model.

The pants/leggings will be tied with straps around the bottoms as seen in the pictures. The tunics can have a variety of necklines, sleeve lengths and hem decorations as well as added vests and leather armor.

The female dresses are a bit easier since most dresses at the time use the same basic style with added features such as ornaments, embroidery, and sleeve variations. Below is an example of a simple dress. The varied colored panels are simply to show the different parts of the model. They can be colored the same or differently. All models, including the men’s clothing can use patterns as well as plain colors.  Again, what you see here is not textured. We will do that after we use a retopology method to lower the the polygons of the garment, making it useable in our game.

Hope you enjoyed our little fashion show! This is just the beginning. One thing to note, each of the above clothing models was made using a sewing method and using authentic medieval patterns.

Also, Unity 5, which will be out sometime near the end of this year, will have a much improved cloth feature that may allow us to use natural flowing cloth for our character’s clothing. No promises, since we do not know yet how improved performance will be over past clothing features in Unity but it looks very promising.  Our other option is to use meshes for the clothing and animate the clothing to move when animated as in most MMO’s.  We will keep you posted on any news we get in the future about the new cloth features in Unity.

Teila