Designing the characters

Some of the decision you must take before you model the characters for your game is if you will make it a realistic or more cartoon like. Something that will fit in to the game's art style.
For the 3d models I use a program called AC3D. It's perfect for low poly models and very fast too.

To make a virtual world beautiful it doesn't have to be realistic to achieve that.
Crimelife 4 is focused on a lowpoly world with more cartoon looking characters. Low poly models can look really great if you use the right textures. And I use high quality nice and clean textures to achieve that.

Most of the textures used in the game are hand made and designed based on sketches I did on paper and from other references. I use Gimp for the textures. Now you will ask why I don't use a more professional program like Photoshop. It's simple, time is important to me. If I want to fix a texture and in Photoshop it will take me around 10 minutes and with Gimp only 5, I will prefer Gimp.

Next step to bring the characters to life is to animate them. I use Milkshape for this. A freeware program that lets you rig and animate your characters the easy way. A few years back I was using Blender but it was very time consuming. I know that Blender has changed over the years and it may be more easy to use today but I still prefer Milkshape. It does exactly what I need.
I setup my character's bones on Milkshape, I do the animation and then I export it to Unity in fbx format. There are tons of animations in game and I'm still adding more when needed.

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Also the comments are open for everyone so feel free to share your thoughts.