After our first prefab library “Complete Characters” which included 104 civilian characters was well received from the 3D industry, we were asked for military characters by many of our customers. Therefore we started the development of “Complete Soldiers” in January 2006 which is available for licensing from our website www.rocketbox-libraries.com.

As with Complete Characters we decided to create the library in a way that the characters would be very easy to customize for our clients. It is definitely good to have a large amount of different pre-made soldiers at hand for all sorts of simulations and games. However we knew that it would be of high value for our clients to have the ability to decide which nationality, camouflage pattern and equipment each of the characters would have. Therefore we have developed a standard for all textures to be additionally included as Photoshop source files that come with many different customizable layers. The layers are organized in a very clean and tidy system which allows for easy exchange or modification of texture details (see video below).

Users can even use one of the 16 premade camouflage patterns with every single soldier character or apply their own.

Also we built the meshes in a way that many of the equipment items would be elements of the mesh that are easy to detach.

Of course a library of soldiers needed a fitting animation set that would be usable in combat situations. For this we did an extensive research on moves that are typically used in first person shooter games and military simulations. Instead of creating various independent single animations, we decided to develop a tree of animations that would include standard initial poses and smooth transitions between the different positions a combat situation requires (e.g. standing, crouched, lying). Variations for usage with different types of weapons (machinegun, pistol, knife) were also added to the set.

Of course as with all our libraries, the assets are suited for usage in realtime applications. The bone weights for the skinning are very well optimized, with no vertex being affected by more than 2 bones. Of course the character meshes are also included in multiple Levels Of Detail with less bones being used in the lower LODs of course.