oDDity

I was joking oonfish, but I'm generally a very opinionated, intransigent, abrasive, sarcastic, cynical, abrupt Irishman, readly for a good argument at the drop of a hat, so don't test me I agree wholeheartedly with that domarious, I despise the silicon bimbo blonde type that pervades the female modeling world. Try browsing an WIP section of any CG board, and look at the females, 90% of the modellers have obviously never seen a real women, they seem to be basing their models on those grotesque, peroxide, collegen and silicon enhanced porn stars which mak me want to vomit rather than masturbate. I didn't like the T3 style AT ALL, the characters will all very badly proportioned ith ridiculously large hands. To be honest, I think this mod is going too far down the T3 road already. I think we should get back to the T1/2 style. I liked nothing about T3 except null's excellent Cradle mission. But yes, I hear what you're saying about have a unique stype. I was thinking more of the mild characature style of the T1/2 concept art (see my priest model)

It's zero problem to sculpt several diffent heads and body types from the same mesh. Making all the new textures for them is the real pain in the ass. I know you can have random anmations playing on the legs body and head, but I'm don't think you can actually change the meshes randomly. This would probaby mean making all the charcaters to some sort of template, which kill creativity.

The overall shape is great, the proportions are perfect, it would be excellent as a low poly game model - but isn't this supposed to be the high res version to source the nomal maps from? You seem to be very tight-fisted with the polys, when you should be writing blank cheques. The main problems as I see it, is the geometric uniform nature of the organic shapes - legs and arms are not perfect cylinders, leather in real life is not flat and perfectly smooth. Eceyting need to be messed up a bt, like it's had a long hard life. And as you say youself, and I pointed out earlier, a lot of the detail still looks injection molded like it's all been beveled out. I have to say, and this is possibly my worst crit - it looks like you're trying to emulate the T3 Garrett model, which I considered risible when I saw in untextured in Lightwave.

True, but in the area of CG, some tools can really speed your workflow up...and of course memorising all the hotkeys I the end I think it's just that some apps 'think' the way some indivisuals think, so some apps seem more natural than others for some. Even though I say Maya's the best all round app, I absolutely hate using it.

So it would be possible to do a mock up of this realatively easily then? I'd like to see if it worked. I think anything that gets away from the current abstract, iconic way of dealing with giving the player information in games (i.e. the HUD) is a good thing. Just because every game has been using it for 20 years doesn't mean it's the best solution for every game.

Maya is the best overall 3d app available yes, but I spend a lot of time hanging around the CG commuity, forums etc, and Lightwave is regarded as the best poly modeler available. It has it's shortcomings obviously, no history, edges or NURBS are the main ones, but it's just so fast and intuituve once you learn it, and you can also virtually 'sculpt' in it , in a way not possible in other apps, apart from ZBrush. I used Lightwave 8, but it's virtually identical to lightwave 7 and 7.5, most of the changes in the newer versions were made to Layout, character setup and animation.

I dunno, it's not that easy a task to model your own creature, make a texture, normal and spec map. I think we should eventually be looking to include all the creature types from the Thief games for FM autors to use. For the moment though, yes, getting the core elements together for a level is what matters.

It wouldn't indicate danger, just that he's in full light, and it doesn't have to be a blasting sound, but subtle as I said. It wouldn't take new players 5 minutes to get used to the light/shadow sound/music, which would obviously have to be distictive. There should be no danger sound telling you when AIs are close etc. I imagine it working perfectly. We need to be innovative as well as copying THief, surely?

Yes, that's really cool, but perhaps a little too alienlike, mainly because of the green stuff. I'll own up and say I hated all the 'woo' in thief, and it mostly spolied my enjoyment of T1, but since the whole idea of this is to let FM authors make whatever they want, we have to include everything, complete with several kitchen sinks.

Well I'm one of those hardcore guys who completely wiped out the T3 UI in the ini files and played with no lightgem. It really doesn't make they game that much harder. Through level design and placement of shadows, you can let the player know pretty much all the time when he's in shadow by looking at his surroundings. THe way I play is just not to let guards have a direct line of sight to me, whether I'm in complete darkness of not, move when they have their backs turned, etc. I would vote for no lightgem, but I'm sure most players wouldn't agree. I would prefer a flat shape which hides at the bottom of the screen though, rather than that spikey round shape. How about something completey different. and playing an ambient or musical sound progressively louder as the player comes into full light and vice versa? Subtle of course, we'd have to come upo with the right sound that would add to the tension.

Ok then I'll work it up a bit and add some flesh to fatten it out, it's just bones and skin ATM.

Ahh well, it' your loss. THe flow is actully much better than max's, which is why I can model that priest in 8 hours, no one EVER switches from modeling in lightwave to any other program once they get into it. Many companies keep lightwave just for the modeler and don't even use the animation program. idSoftware and Epic both do this, which is why the Unreal and Doom engines both directly import the .lwo format. They used Maya and Max respectively for the animating and FX. It's just that you've become so accustomed to being whacked over the head with a hammer than you miss is when it isn't there Godawful user interface?? What, you mean a column of buttons with text written on them telling you what they do? You prefer all those dinky little icons in Max?

It's no work at all to make different heads. IT doesn't actually require a change of heads at all. At a basic level you could just change the texture. The three heads you see in that shot above are all the same mesh, I just sculpted it into differnt features using various different tools in lightwave. So, I could take that female model for example and sclulpt her in to endless different body types and faces in a very short time. It's actually much nore time consuming making the different textures for her.

Yes, they are all my own work. (the nerve ) It may be easier if I could up load them somewhere here, and whoever wants to can down load them. Another problem is that if you're using a program other than Lightwave for modeling/texturing (Lightwave is way better than Max at these jobs, switch over immediately and dont waste any more of your time in Max) But if you do insist on using max, the mesh smooth modifier in max uses a different algorithm than the lightwave subpatch, so you tend to get a lot of ugly errors in the mesh, wich you'll have to sort out by hand.

I was thinking I could maybe use motion builder to add some mocaped animations, but the problem here is that there isn't a huge selection, so they may not be exactly what we want. I'm not an animator though, so it's great if you can handle it. You're also confisent about setting up and animatng the rigs for things like burricks etc?

Here, all three characters you see here use the same body mesh. I basically sculpt it into what ever I want it to be, and then add the clothing/armor bell and whistles etc. on top.

Well I read in another post o the forums here that 7500-8k polys is the target for characters. I'll have no problem whatsoever getting to that level from the current 30k It's never a good idea to have large details like the belt buckle just a flat plain with a normal map, it's always best to have some basic geometry there as well that more or less follows the high res shape. That's not a problem though, there's a plugin for Lightwave call qemLOSS which does just that job. I'll have to get this textured and normal/spec mapped and into Doom to see what the final effect will be. I currently have no idea how god/bad/average it will look inside the game.

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This is one I had already modeled months ago. It needs a lot of working up, but it's a start.

Who keeps their monitor at 800x600 these days?I would have thought 1024x768 was the norm, I have mine at 1280x1024, anything else now makes is seem like I'm looking at it through a telescope. I think the burrick looks fine (do we really have to go through with this facade of calling everything by a slightly different name? - who do you think we're fooling)) What about animations though? A creature like this requires a special rig and animation set, something I've never done before. Do we have any animators?

I was just thinking I could supply anyone who wants it with a male and female template, they're anatomically correct, and just have to be pushed , squashed, resized, tweaked etc. Of course it doesn't make it any easier, and it isn't cheating, you still have all the modeling to do on top of it, but it does give you something perfect to build the armour/clothing around, and saves the time modeling hands and feet and a new head for every character.. I use them as a base for all my characters, even monsters. I was just thinking that it may halp some people wo want to model but aren't confident enough to start a character from scratch. I'l post shots of them later.

Ever tried Lightwave modeler? Much better than max at that job. But I suppose if you're alreay used to max, it's a pain to learn another app. Maybe its just the flat lighting in those shot than makes it look like one contiguous mesh. How many polys so far? And a thought that just occured to me- since this is first person, we aren't actually going to see the model in-game?

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HEh, Garrett'll have to problem spotting that guy in the dark) If you really want to texture it, I'll send you the model. As for the animation, yes, Doom only supports verts that have been moved by bones , so we'll just have to add extra bones on a per character basis depending on where they need them. I won't be actually animating a cloth simulation, just basically moving it out of the way at key frames to stop it cutting through the mesh. This means that we'll have to use max for the animations, since we can have a base animation for all the humanoid characters, save it out as a .bip and .fig file, and then use that as template and add in the extra bones per character as needed. That way we won't need a completely separate rig and anims for each character. Here's some wires as requested my DeepOmega. I wouldn't pay too much note of the shape of the mesh in that pose, since I basically twisted the polys around manually to strike that pose, not paying to much attention to anything that was out of shot.