BlackThief

ok that works, but his fingers are in a quite loose position - he doesn't seem to grap a heavy sword - can you fix that in motion builder, dom?

managed to export the search anim, however after exporting I noticed that the sword animation somehow got lost during the conversion to maya - I looked at it in motion builder and it looks fine there, but after importing it into maya the sword somehow flows in the middle of nowhere...domarius can you check if everything is setup correctly in the fbx file? I tried importing several times, but it's always the same problem

ok I'm able to import the fbx into maya now, however 2 skeletons are imported - I guess I can delete the one, that doesn't match the mesh, but I'm not sure about this and why 2 skeletons are imported. oddity any idea what's going wrong?

the difference is, that d3's engine was released 2004 and runs on a geforce3 and unreal3 games will be released in 2007 and its minimum specs is a geforce6800. and epic advertises soft dynamic shadows: I know its nitpicking and they'll probably fix this for ut2k7, but it just caught my eye on the screens.

yes look at the shadow of the guy - it's obviously a shadow texture or the new uber engine Unreal 3 has VERY poor soft dynamic shadows - I can even count every single pixel of the "soft" edge. Look at the other character renders on that site, they all look like that. Battlefield shadows look similar to this...

looks nice, but I noticed that some of the shadows look rather poor: http://img.gamespot.com/gamespot/images/20...7_screen001.jpg almost like a simple projected shadow texture like last gen games used it. any information on the engine?

that's fine for now, as I'm going to start with the exterior anyway. The first floor should probably have at least some walls, otherwise there'll probably performance issues, when the player is able to view such a big room with lots of details.

hi squawks both the head and your concept look really very nice. I guess you're really the person we've been looking for so long. We need someone, who is able to model AND texture objects and especially characters, since I am at the moment the only one doing both on the team and thus everything is progressing rather slow. I'm looking forward to your monster, but I guess we could hire your right away, since your work already shows your great artistic abilities btw are you also familiar with rigging/animating game models? the facial expressions look very nice and we could really use someone who has some experience in this field as well. -BT

love that as well. couldn't hold myself and so I created already 3 textures for it If you find the time I'd love to have a floorplan of this, so I could give this a try and model the whole thing completely. (have holidays for the next two weeks, so I've got plenty of time)

hard to tell - I just browsed through all the farrell files and beside some specific anims like he showed to us in his video there seem to be various walk-cycles, crouch and lean-anims. One thing I noticed was that in some files the thief has arrows and a blackjack but most models only had the sword and bow - that's not only a modelling/animating issue, but also a an issue we probably have to discuss with the programmers - the d3 marine never had any weapons connected except the current weapon he's carrying. I'm not sure, how we're going to do that with our thief - we have the blackjack, sword bow and quiver - when these belong to the thief(body) model and are animated with it we'd have to do all animations for every possible combination of blackjack, sword and bow. if they are connected to the player model in another way we'd need only animations for the body + the attacks. I've no idea if this will work properly - it obviously does in most of the RPGs I played, but I can't remember seeing an object connected to an AI like that in d3. Most likely this won't be a big task for our programmers though. so all in all as a realist I'd say, no - it'll take longer to get the player ingame.

I would like to give you a small modelling/texturing task and then I think Springheel and I can decide. There's no doubt you can model, but your portfolio isn't really showing off your texturing skills, so here're some props we still need - you can decide which one you take: 1. a wine cask reference: http://i23.ebayimg.com/04/i/04/57/a1/e2_1_b.JPG (of course a dirtier, more medieval version) 2. a street lantern reference: http://www.suntrend.com/suntrend/images/lantern22.jpg (minus the electric bulb) 3. a fireplace reference: http://www.stonecarver.com/fp/Potter-Fireplace.jpg choose one of these and post your model + texture when you're done, so that we can decide on your application.

well I'll do a less roman looking version later. imho a totally roman looking guard wouldn't really fit into the more medieval, and more nothern style world of thief. unfortunately this will probably take a while, since I have to redo some parts of this one, especially the upper arms with the leather stripes - they turned out quite bad on the normalmap and I don't want to model them all into the lowpoly version. I'll make them a lot wider, more like in this painting:

started texturing the body-armour: here's an ingame shot:

after testing the deformations in maya I finally uvmapped the whole dude and after almost 40 minutes d3 rendered the normalmap of the body-armour. actually it came out pretty good imho, only the part of the shoulderpats is a bit messed up on the normalmap. since I've got holidays for the next two days I hope I'll be able to finish this one. compare the amount of detail with the lowpoly mesh: http://people.freenet.de/darkmod/low_smooth1.jpg

I thought it was on CVS too, but I'll see if I can find it again.

that would be very appreciated oddity, I've been learning maya for a week now, so I know the very basics, but it's very hard to find a proper tutorial for realtime engine rigging.

thanks dram - that works now I'm proud to present my first ragdoll - of course it doesn't work properly, but at least I've got something that behaves like a ragdoll and it's ingame I also learned that the bones strucutre has to follow the object really closely in order to have a working ragdoll - you can see that on the screenshot. I've got only one chain of bones and thus the sign behaves rather weird. (ignore the texture - I just pointed to the chair material, since I haven't done a texture for the sign yet)

dom was sarcastic. of course it had something to do with oddity - just check the old threads. whenever someone criticized the size of his models he said that he's doing the models and thus he decides on the size of them.

spar sarcasm.... from down-under

thanks ish. I found a tutorial written by Oddity last night, hope that I'll be able to figure this out myself now.

as far as I know oddity rigged everything in maya, so you won't find any bones in lightwave. The files you have are lwo, right? That mean these are just model files, it's quite complicated to rig something in lightwave, as I said before. You have to create skelegons in modeller, but then you have to import the model into lightwave-layout and convert them to bones over there. So if you haven't got any lws(lightwave-scene) files there won't be any bones.

this is really getting on my nerves again - can anyone tell me, why this damn af-editor isn't able to write an .af-file???? the console always gives me:

yep, it works now anyone any experience with articulated figures, or whatever ragdolls are called in d3? ish?

looks like I finally figured out, how to do it. tavern sign is properly rigged now. now I have to find out, how to do the ragdoll....

no resizing is no problem. actually we CAN do some smaller changes to the mesh without having to recreate the highpoly. just no significant changes...