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Welcome back oDDity. Excellent Builder model by the way.

OMG he is back ! and this model looks just damn AWESOME ! with a better red-cloth texture this will rock !

Crystal and Broadhead Arrows are up on the FTP - includes two .ASE files, 2 UV guides, and 2 shading guides (basically, I burned some light onto a 50% gray texture, so you can use this to make the diffuse map), and 1 incomplete normal map. For the normal map, fill all gray areas with RGB of 127 127 255, and it should work fine. Feel free to not use it if you'd rather. No screenies, as the model itself is not at all different from what I've already done - but now it can get in game (hypothetically). 280 polys for the broadhead, less for the crystal.

Absolutely. In my little town, $225k bought a mansion (literally - I mean a huge place) up on the bluffs overlooking the river, 14 short years ago. I know, because it was the family of a close friend. I remember thinking to myself, with an internal laugh, "those rich bastards paid almost a QUARTER OF A MILLION FOR A HOUSE!!" as if it was such a big deal. Today, the friend himself paid $275k for a place half the size (same town). There was just a home for sale on main street for $900k. This is not Beverly Hills, just a fairly quaint, semi-nice town. The average price for an average place around here (yard, 3 floors, etc) is around $400k. To think that the house I was born in some ~30 years ago (3 floors, basement, big yard, driveway) was $15k makes me dizzy. Inflation, yes - but a "middle class paycheck" has not changed anywhere near as much as real estate (and cars, etc). I feel people accept too much. If no one bought, there'd be no choice for manufacturers and sellers but to produce and offer for less or go under. If suddenly 400k players said to Sony, "we're not paying our subscription this month, as a unified player base, unless it comes down to $9.99 again", you better believe that price would drop. Now that would be an interesting precedent, wouldn't it. Must. Resist. Topic. Re: Valve - I don't honestly think they're up to shenanigans, either. But it's a model I don't want to support. At least... not until/unless I have little other choice.

The SDK has been out one day and that decision is made? I wonder what the motivation was. For me personally, if all of the garbage about steam is true and unavoidable, I won't be playing HL2 in it's current state. Sad thing is, that just enough people (Just enough? Almost the entire gaming population, more likely) will buy it and support this model, resulting in the highest yields for a game ever by far, and we will soon see most games adopting this means. Thanks, Valve, for your insight. Perhaps a merger with Microsoft soon?

The model that is uploaded can not be used. Either somebody cleans it up or models it from scratch. It has a lot of vertices which are pretty uselessand geometry that looks quite strange. All on the underside.

Coin pouch is up on the FTP in ASE and a TGA for the UV map. There may be a little stretching around the edges, so let me know if I need to re-UV it. It's a simple little model so it shouldn't be a big deal.

No. When you look at T2 then you will notice that it tilts (or is it yaw?) as well, indicating the players absolute world orientation. So if you look upwards the compass moves accordingly. Nevertheless, the engine doesn't know that and it would accept that model. You always have to have solid models with proper thickness. No single polygonthick models.

I don't get it - what's wrong with the corners ?? The problem with the model is that there are some really unnecesarry faces (for example on the back chair-legs) that are even so small that it's a pain in the ass to UV-map it. I don't where they come from and I also don't know, how to handle this. I'm still a noob at modelling.

Oh god. Please, please, please do not use that program. Please. look what it's doing to your corners! Look at the fanning you're getting! Better to use an overpolied model than THAT. If you want, I can take a look at it and point out specific areas where it can be streamlined.

I'm just skinning the lightgem. Of course I do this for myself and not for you, because you can expect how it will look when I do this. I noticed a severe problem with the model from oofnish. It is hollow. Doom 3 can not render this because it doesn't accept doublesided polygons. So for all models that are built they always need a seperate bottom even if you think it will never be seen. In the case of the lightgem this is of course not really true, because it depends on the players position what you can see. If the player turns around enough the bottom might be seen a little so it will need it anyways.

yeah we'll have to agree on one seat-height. anyway I found a nice, very profesional tool to reduce the triangle/poly count same chair with only 528 triangles - that's 75% less !!! and I think it still doesn't look different to the one with 2000 triangles. [img]http://www.dark-project.com/BlackThief/chair_wireframe2.jpg[/img] ONE problem though - I only have a trial version and so I can't safe the model The tool is called SIM Rational Reducer - prize for standalone software: about 6000 $ - 3dsMax plugin about 600 $ maybe someone can find a way to get it on another way - you know what I mean

In D3 I'm pretty sure that the boounding box, you can see in the editor, is used for that. I noticed this with the coins. I tried to change the box and it was in such a way that it was off center. Very high above the coinstakc, but the bottom end of it was almost exactly at the bottom of the stack. When I tried this ingame I noticed that I couldn't frob the stack on the bottom end but I had a large area at the upper end. So I guess that D3 is using this bounding box unless you are using a collision model.

yes, but people always think and talk in polygons 2000 triangles/1000 polys is quite alright, isn't it ? BTW already started UV-mapping it, but I had to start again, cauze there was something missing on the model. I'm going to use the same texture as the coffeetable - there's so much space left and I can use the wood-texture for the chair as well. this way we'll safe memory

Don't we want physics collision models for each model too?

blame me - I dunno what I calculated last night - whatever :lol: the model doesn't have 4000 polygones - it only has about 1000. I think I multiplied the triangles by 2 instead of divde them :lol: So I think that I even can add some more detail - any suggestions ?

It's the same for coding. If you have to modify an existing code it strongly depends on how it was written. Often it is faster to rewrite it from scratch and you are save of copyright claims this way. As the current situation looks it seems so. Yes. And it would be nice if you could upload your current model to the FTP.

Its an interesting debate ..about the copyright issues. I don’t know how the games industry works but I know how it relates to real models / sculptures and I would imagine it would be the same ..its a 3d form at the end of the day. The copyright law is a very very grey area. Example take any sculpture/ model at alter it by 10 % and you are in the clear ..now the problem is what is 10% ..and that is such a can of worms I won’t even get into it . Using other models could help speed things up a little but by the time you have spent making sure you have changed it beyond recognition I think you are just as well starting form scratch. I have used other models in the past and it always seams to me that it takes longer because you have to destroy the original first then do the artistic bit . So have we lost oddity then? ..it occurred to me I have all the files I used for noble man ..I save every hour or so ..so somewhere in that lot there should be a fairly decent template ..would it help anyone ?

ok first screen: ATM it has about 4100 poly and there's nothing that could be done with normalmaps - too much IMO. Is there a way to "optimize" the model ? I just think that it should be possible to have the same quality with much less polys...

Yeah, just a suggestion since I had all 99 characters here in .3ds format. I thought the same thing about copyright issues too, but at the same time there would be nothing left of the original models by the time we're finished with them. When you think about it, it's not so different from what we are doing with some of the textures that are based on Thief 2 textures. Some of those textures are essentially high res versions of the old ones. It would be a much greater difference between the models than the textures. Anyway, I won't edge us into oblivion with that suggestion, but they're here if we would like to play with them. I think copyright issues could only be laid against us if we were to import the exact model...poly for poly...skin for skin. Still, won't hurt to use them internally for testing purposes. I do believe we're aloud to do that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's BT's model? Or NH's? I don't think it's mine...

Deep Omega, hear that? I have no idea what it means, but the coins are your model, right? BTW, any progress on identifying units of measure for the various modelling programs so we can get the size right the first time?

YES! That's the spirit. I think it's easier to remove the normalmaps for slower machines afterwards, but it should look really good an adequate machines. After all we are in competition. Yes. The problem is that we don't have the model. We only have the ASE file (BlackThief and me) and that can not imported into Blender, only exported. So we can not resize it.

I think as long as junk looks like junk ( drab - no specular) and the fancy stuff is gold and jeweled ( with a nice specular) we can clearly establish what is junk and what is loot. Junk plates in the original games for example were white or a somewhat rough looking metal. With Thief 3, they never really set any specific rules for what was junk and loot. In many cases they just used the same model with a different texture. I think to be successful in this, we would have to vary some of our models a bit. Not so much with plates, but cups perhaps.

And what about my bowl? And yes. We should have a seperate info on skinning. As well as on animation. Because these are independent tasks that are different steps in the progress of a model.