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What is it with 3D apps and incomprehensible, overly complex and non standard user interfaces? Its as if they feel the need to justify the silly price tags by making them as unfathomable and proprietry as possible. Cinema 4D is heaven in this respect. Standard UI and elegant simplicity abound. Everything else is the spawn of satan. Shame on you software engineers Don't get me started on audio apps. All those hundreds of tiny tiny dials and sliders you're supposed to interact with via a clumsy mouse. WTF is that all about. Bastards edit - looking good omega

Yes it does. Trust goldfishguy. Apple Macs traditionally used to default at 72dpi for screen resolution but anything up to (and sometimes beyond) 96dpi is common these days. Take a 17" screen. 800x600 (about 62dpi) is going to be a different resolution to 1280x1024 (about 96dpi). comprendez. good. But anyhow goldfish guy, Springheels right too. Ain't no one got a 300dpi monitor. Not many folks have a 300dpi printer for continuous tone images for that matter. But yeah. Huge images on the internet is just rude. Post little pics if possible please. Or link to larger piccies if needs must. Life is nice and cosy when you are young and healthy and with good eyes - like you and me. 800x600 on a 17" screen is good for anyone a bit far sighted or a bit over the hill though. Feel sorry for anyone checking the forums on a web enabled phone.... (something I do from time to time)

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.

Not necessarily. I'm sure the FM community at large will be more than happy to build their own custom content. Much better to provide a solid set of IK bones and walk (etc.) animations that can be customised than multiple variations on everything. It is, aftar all a (sort of) fairly streight forward proposition to plonk a crayman model and skin on top of a zombie bone-set and call it a beasticle. I hate to be the nay sayer (again) but we really should be concentrating on getting some basic characters in the Dooooom engine, getting them animated and ironing out all the problems as a priority. Hows about applying some thought to character animation and poses springheel and Darkness Falls. Something a bit like a story board (but for individual actions) that can be used a guide for key frames. How about giving some detail on the existing concepts. Or providing side and front views to make the modelling process that much easier.... Grrr. I really don't like making this point over and over because the concept art that you guys are producing is a treat. They really do look fantastic. But these are parallel tasks that can be taken up at pretty much any point. There are mission critical tasks that need addressing first. err, yeah - anyway. what the other guys have said. The grey and green colours are a bit alien-eseque. Are these things blind/poor sighted or do they have big reflective eyes for seeing in the dark? Big crayfish tenticles would be cool for feeling your way around in the gloom. Spiders. I want Spiders.

I'm glad I read your post there, oDDity. I now wish they taught us Lightwave at Uni instead of 3DSMax. I suppose I can teach myself anyway. Always worked before What version of light wave did you use to model that Priest?

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.

they used a 3d model in thief1/2 and simply changed the textures.

Ok, we have had plenty of discussion of what the lightgem should look like, and I think we have reached a consensus of sorts. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=48&st=25 Now what we need is someone to actually create the thing. I would be willing to do it, but honestly, I'm not quite sure how. Is this going to be a 3d model? If not, how is it going to be animated? I know it's not as simple as just making a single image in Photoshop, but someone is going to have to explain how to approach this so that we can get going on this.

Ah, thanks. Applegeeks' forums aren't bad for tutorials either.

This might be the right time to ask about female models. I recall T1/2 had female guards, and I would like to go back to that in TDM if it's not too hard to do. On another note, I have a question for you modellers. I would like to make it so that not every Builder/Guard/Citizen, etc, has the same head. At the same time, it is a lot of work to model and entire person just to change the head. How difficult is it to make interchangeable heads, and what would I have to take into consideration in the concept drawings?

If you're interested in some good tutorials and critical feedback, there are a couple good forums to look at. Epilogue is one that has a lot of stuff available that might help. http://www.epilogue.net/cgi/phpBB2/

I'd like access to these templates to work from. Hook a brother up! I don't think there would be any copyright issues with taking a model of a human being and tweaking it to our specifications. Last time I checked, the human shape wasn't copyrighted?? hehe As for the Ogre like creature... even if these resources were created by someone else, we're going to be tweaking them. If I use a Storm Trooper as a template, but proceed to change the outfit color, give them a different mask, give them different armour, etc... and in the end doesn't look anything like a storm trooper... does it really matter that the original inspiration was a storm trooper? After all the tweaks, it's my own creation at that point.

The thief model would probably be used in cinematics, body awareness, and potentially the spy-orb if we have one. But yes, for the most part it wouldn't be seen in the game from what I understand.

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.

From tests i've seen, applyign the "cloth" effect on the model is probably asking for trouble. Whatever physics dictate something like that would have a hell of a time staying straight on a moving entity. Unless you gave it a heavy weight at the bottom, that might keep it from getting too wild. oDDity, how many polys is the builder model and the hammer? I was thinking that if we need to reduce polys on it, much of it could be made into normalmaps, such as the belt buckle and the wrist straps.

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?

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.

....whoa. You just made an already awesome model even better.

Hi there Im Dieblein, Leader of the Rpg project "Return to Mana" for Hl2. (http://returntomana.mods.de. I just rushed in here to congratz you to the work done so far. Thief is one of my all time best games I ever thought of making a nice sequel or mod based on it in the future. So I hope you can proove the will to not break up until the mod has been done. I saw your modling threads @cgtalk, its good to post there because that really imroves the quality of the 3d work. As you may know its so important to keep looking and comparing yourself with the worlds top notch artists because you can always learn more. Stop learning is the worst thing that can ever happen to you. So I hope you can go along with the project, In any case I wish you best of luck with it and perhaps we can chat a little and maybe I could help you out with some of the model work later. Is there an Irc you usually hang out? Dont give up, keep up the good work! Greetings Dieblein

If you find something out then you should probably download this http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=255 and incorporate it there to test it out. My next plans are to figure out how to change the buttons, and how to let the SDK do something for me.

But since you can define different bones for any model, I don't think it should be a huge problem.

It's coming along very well now, but you seem to be trying to bevel all the detail into the main body mesh, rather than making everything separate parts. That's ok for a low poly character, (even then if you look at the UT characters for example, every detail is a sperate mesh)but for a high res one there is no poly limit, so it's looks better if you model all the detail separately. Studs, straps, belts etc. Also try not to make everything look so perfectly geometric, mess the verts around a bit. What program are you using?