What style are we going for? Like as realistic as possible... or a little cartoonish? It ain't gonna look good if there's a photorealistic human riding a My Little Pony.
1 Ogre Material is desired for performance reasons.
I tried to search the Ogre site for some info but it didn't help much. Does '1 material' mean that the model can have only one diffuse texture, and nothing else? Or can we add normal maps and other textures?
An Ogre Material can be a combination of textures with shaders. Think of a Quake 3 Shader file or a DirectX Effect file. Check out the Ogre Wiki Entry. A material can contain one or more passes. Each indiviual material must contain at least one pass.
I added your suggested standard in the list above. Models should be realistic, but not ultra-realistic. I'm aiming for a Final Fantasy 8 look.
without an editor that can apply these things from a milkshape model its a little pointelss for me so until these effects and everything can be put on using RF 2 im not gona b any good.
I made a quick little sketch for a possible character, but seeing as how you mentioned Final Fantasy I quickly got some Anime influence in it, BUT since i only draw American stuff, it ended up coming out like crap lol.
(don't expect much from me, I tend to work myself up with these things haha)
SO yeah, i probably wont make this, just posting it as an idea for whoever wants it.
Actually...it's not that bad. It's better than anything I can do. It might look different in 3D. Can you model and animate it? Just a walk animation for now. There is a bunch of free motion capture data floating around the net somewhere.
I suggest you to steal the skeleton and the motion from a game like HL2 or FarCry. I know it's not strictly legal though
1) the theft isn't visible. Before the distribution of the game you can encrypt somehow the model
2) you can create a model with a 20$ app like milkshape good as a commercial one but, as a matter of fact, you cannot animate it at the same level
3) you're not going to sell the game
If you need horses take a look at Dark Messiah. The models and animations can be easily grabbed using the HL2 mod tools... the game has some great melee and sword fighting animations.