oDDity

Lol , that's my favourite gif of all time, and any excuse to use it is alright by me. NH, you're welcome to marry my sister any day.

Moss arrows aren't woo either, working examples could easily be made. Zombies on the other hand are quite blatant and first degree woo. I restrict woo to the following: Undead (haunts, ghosts, zombies) Burricks THe Trickster Potions (health, invis, slowfall) Magic casters It wouldn't affect the game that much to leave those out, after all, T2 had few examples of any of them.

Bots aren't woo) You can argue bots like that would have been impossible at that 'time period', but that doesn't make them woo. What makes something woo, is it's shameless audacity in wantonly breaking the laws of physics, and being completely impossible now and forever.

Yes, that's te way to go. I liked those old hand paint panoramas from THief. All you need then is to soure some images of the night sky. Morrowind had some fantastic nighht skys, I have it installed ATM, I wonder if I could get the night sky images out somehow.. Failing that there are loads of astronomy sites around.

We're all old fellas here, I'm 33, though I haven't the experience in CG that you obviously have, it's just a two year old hobby with me. That's great work, and it's great to welcome a fellow Lightwaver

Yes, I was thinking that myself. Though I suppose we could set the dark mod on real Earth in the past, and make it a real medieval thief simulation (that's 'thief' with a small 't') just like I always wanted Thief to be. DEATH TO WOO!!!

Yup, great stuff, you could model a matching goblet as well and use more or less the same textures. Simply normal mapping the textures is fine for something like a plate, where the detail is n=on the textures anyway, but for more complex models, like the chair you made, it needs to be normal mapped properly. If you can't do it, send me the low and high res models, and I'll send you back the normal map.

I'm not sure whether to model a whole load and then batch convert thm to game ready, or get them in the game as I model them.

Those are great textures again. Perhaps I should send you my models for texturing, it's my least favourite job I take it you're not actually generating any normal maps on the objects themselves, just using the nvida photohop plugin on the textures?

I provided ase files of the lightgem anyway. If you're exporting from LW, export as an obj. Almost all apps can import obj files. Deep Exploration is also a very handy program to have, it converts between 30 or so 3d formats, and yu can view the models also. There's a free trial you can D/L from www.righthemisphere.com.

And does it matter how high res the compass model is? Does it affect performace for the player?we could dicus these sorts of things in real time, rather than like this - it's taken all these posts and the best part of a day to sort this out, which could have been sorted in 10 minutes real time, I suspect. Message board really aren't a very convienient way to tak, it's really just a succession of one sided arguments.

Well if those are to be the final gem textures as seen in-game then they'll have to be brighter than that. I thought the gem would be rendered in a 3d app first where the luminosity could be controled, and then 16 bitmaps of it would be taken and used. I'll render them again.

THat's another great piece. Reminds me a little of my NB pirate with the one piece mask and hood. Do you paint these digitally or the old fashioned way? Cloaks are not hard to model, it's just animating them or a game engine that's the pain in the ass, especially for a game like this with all sorts of sneaking. crouching. mantling, and climbing.

Now, how am I supposed to know which exact angle you're going to put the comapss in at. I though you would do the gem renders youself. Those gem textures are to be put on the gem model, you can render the bitmaps youself at whatever angle you need. The model is exactly the same size an Oonfish's. All you have to do is resize it to doom proportions in whatever 3d app you use. Maybe I should send you the Lightwave scene, and you can do the gem renders yourself. I have an envelope on the luminosity channel, which finishes at 100, but you can make it higher if you want it brighter. Or esle we'll have to wait till I get a faster connection next week, there's no way I'm downloading all the dark mod stuff on a 56k.

ROFL, I notice they kept spelling 'Dalai' as 'Dalia' Thanks for scanning that for me, it was in UK PC Gamer a few months ago as well, but I missed that one too. I've been doing CG for 2 years and already get published in PC Gamer- that has to be some sort of record

Yay! Another woo Vs the Mechs debate! I'm a T2 guy myself, I played it first and it's still in my top three favourite games. THe amount of woo and other nonsense in T1 really put me off the game. I have to say though, the Cradle mission from T3 was excellent, so woo can be done well. My favoutie mission types are generally the normal mansion/bank/warehouse/museum jobs, the sort of thing a thief would actually do, not those silly save-the-world-superhero or ghostbuster missions

Ok,I uploaded it, it doesn't look as good in its low poly UV mapped state as it does in the gif render I posted eariler, since I can control the lighting and luminosity of the gem there, but it'll do for test purposes. Does it need a spec map for the hud light rendering? Does it even matter ho high res it is?

I'm still not sure how it works Where does it's lighting come from then? Or does it not have any real time lighting on it. It looks much cooler ith lighting as it turns. WOuldn't it be as easy just to use a series of bitmaps for the whole thing >

So the compass takes it's lighting from the environment like other objrects in the map, and will need to be low res with normal, and spec maps?

No that's the actual model, though I haven't uv mapped it yet. Do we see the actual model on the screen, or a series of bitmaps of it? Will we only see the actual gem from one angle, and if so wich angle (top or perspective like I show it there)

Ahh right, I was copying that pendant you showed. I'll make the compass more like the Oonfish model. In fact I'll download the model and tweak it instead.

Something like this? (wait for it, it's quite a big gif) Also, I was thinking I'd need to indicate in some way which one of the spikes points north.

Yes, didn't you see the characters I used to show there as well? It's a complete dump now since they hired a bunch of puritan mods to police the forum when T3 was released. It's no fun any more.

Ok, so basically copy the one Oonfish modeled? It'll take 20 minutes to model, but getting all the 16 textures sorted out will probably take quite a while

Is there any concept art for this lightgem?