Ze Astronaut!

What I call “the astronaut” is the little guy in the original game that you make walk around the spaceport.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am pretty gosh darn good at architectural 3D modeling. However, my ability to model organic objects is really bad. So, when it comes time to do something about having a player model walk around the Arth Starport, I begged the Internet gods for a ready-made model that I could just drop into the game and use.

And the gods delivered.

On archive3d.net I discovered a model aptly named “Astronaut 3D Model” that is pretty decent, and already in the T-pose for rigging. I’m no expert at rigging character models, but it is something I know how to do. So, I imported the 3DS model into Max, fixed up the smoothing groups, rigged and skinned the model (badly), and exported it into the FBX format that Unity likes.  Oh, and I also assigned some material IDs to certain parts of the suit so I could at least have different colors on the suit and not have it be all white.

I found the run animation in Unity’s asset store, and the idle animation also came from Unity’s asset store.  Both were free giveaways.

While the animations generally work well, the run animation does has a hitch in it, most likely from my bad rigging job. If anybody would volunteer to give me a better model and / or animations I would be more than happy to accept.  🙂