Prototypation Art:The Character part 1

Meet the Engineer Prototypation Character

I choose my reference character to be 3 head tall and sized as 2 vertical grid cells. It have to be able to jump / climb / vault over 1 grid cell sized obstacles.

The character I have In mind was a building site worker.

I downloaded a really well made model of the tf2 engineer from Tommy Tallian collection of low poly tf2 characters http://tommytallian.blogspot.it/p/low-poly-tf2.html.

I had to made it 3 heads tall then rigged and skinned  it with bones to animate it.So say welcome to the "Midget Engineer".

The model is very low poly(around 400 poly) with a really small and optimized texture.

Those are more Nintendo Ds ish kind of specs for a 3d model, but it doesn't matter for a prototypation model.

Plus i can subdivide it few times to  generate some kind of fake lods to test on devices different polygonal budgets

Animation/Skeleton

I used a low spec skeleton setup(few spine bones,no facial bones,no twist bones and cloth bones).
The rig in the pic miss the thumbs probably i had them hidden when I took the shot.

Project Anarchy makes possible to have different skeleton lods and  share the same animation on different lods.For this project I probably will not need many advanced animation features , but I could try to use them for blogging purpose.

One thing I want to test is the retargeting between this prototypation and my final character to test this feature with a real use case(even if it is not the case as i don't need a realtime retargeting).

Prototipation animation don't have to be great looking but at least have to feature correct timing final displacement/translation component.