Recently I’ve started working on a school project where I am part of a modding team. I'm new to modding, I have however done various character models and animation for the web and broadcast. I’ll be doing character modelling and animations for the project, no programming I don’t know anything about that.

I have been looking through this forum and other online sources like 3DBuzz, I’ve seen some video tutorials but I still have some questions.

1. What is the (average) height for a character in Unreal, in grid units? I’ve read quite a few contradictory claims from 128 units to 240, so this is a bit confusing.

2. There is an issue in Maya about the axis orientation. I know that you can switch the “up axis” from Y to Z in Maya’s preferences. However I haven’t seen this solution in any of the documentation and tutorials, is there a reason why this wont work? Most solutions change the orientation afterwards, in UnrealED or flipping in Maya after the model and animation have been created. If there is a way of setting you scene up to prevent this problem I would really prefer it.

3. How many polygons is decent for a character? We are Using Unreal 2004 for the project. I have found some guidelines UDN - two - UnrealModeling but they are for Unreal 2003. We wil be showcasing the project on a decent workstation with quite a bit of power. I always assumed the polycount depends on the power of the graphics card.

P.S.
I am using Maya 6.01 on Windows XP and I plan to use the ActorX plugin. I am still waiting for the Unreal engine and UnrealED to come in, so I cant really test anything yet.

Using the actorx plugin it is pretty painless. To make things even easier Wharghoul wrote a great script that I link to on my tutorial.

http://jeffparrott.com/mayaut2k4_01.html

Whargoul's script adjusts the Y Z planes and has every skeleton in there as well. Hope it helps.

i always knew the player height in UT2k3 as 96 units. the unreal wiki said it was 80x50.

Does that apply to UT2k4 as wel?

Thanks I'll look into it.

#2 isn't really an issue. It's just that the author decided (or forgot) not to work in z-up. I believe setting your scene to z-up will let you avoid having to correct the rotation of your model once you've gotten it in the engine.

Btw UT2K3 and UT2K4 are running off the same engine, and target the same hardware specs. The difference between the games is one of content, nothing technical.