Search the Community

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 would be more economical to have the heads seperate from the bodies, wouldn't it? It would mean more programming work - we'd have to have a "head type" etc. property for each model, but it would allow for more variety in game. No matter how many unique models you make, if you could swap their heads etc. around, you'd have even more combinations.

As a concept artist, what's more critical for me than to create concept art? I can't yet model stuff in CGI because I don't have that experience. Spiders? you can't have spiders. You can't handle the spiders. HA, LOL, I bet there'll be spiders some day. I'm not an animator or programmer, but aren't there already a multitude of resources available to do this? Seems like the skeletal framework of many creatures probably already exists in the Doom 3 SDK if not on the web? 3-D Studio Max has skeletons for a few things already pre-loaded.

Yeah, such as giving her some hips.... I didn't mean any offense in questioning whether the models were yours or not. ( I can't tell if you were joking with "the nerve" above). I was just impressed with the apparent quality of the models. I've seen people take, say, one of the Poser character model meshes and try to pass them off as their own work which got the Daz3d people upset. But victoria's hawt.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

Yes, I really love the book idea. I'm not sure we should display the Thief in action since we're a first person perspective game. It may lead the player on a bit in that respect. We do have that lovely Thief model... , but we'll get to see it on other Thieves thank goodness.

oDDity has been assigned the Builder Priest model, and this is the thread for him to post any work or comments regarding it. I know it's not exactly priority stuff, but if oDDity can do these as quickly as he says he can, then it won't matter.

I whipped these up right fast cuz I thought we could use a few more shots for the website. I decided to stretch out the texture window to give it a nice cinematic widescreen (everyone loves a good widescreen shot) and threw in one of the old lightgem drawings to give it an ingame look. lol, I had to go to the old boards to find the lightgem I had in mind...it was a blast reading through all the old posts and seeing how far we've come in just a couple of months. Anyway...on with the show. This is my semi finished art gallery, what originally started out as quickly built room designed to help Springheel test out his textures turned into a 500 brush monster that's probably one of the better maps I've done in awhile. I dunno if I like the angle of the screenshot too much, but eh...I've already doctored it up. Oh yeah, I also added a specular to the beige wall, which improved it considerably. The Gallery And the tried and true basement shot with a slight specular added to the wall texture. I'd replace the old basement shot on the webpage with this one. The Basement Also, see if DeepOmega wants to post his newer Thief model up in place of the old one. The face, along with the smoother look, is worth the update.

Lowpoly. That's the model that's actually used in game. Man, I can't wait to animate this guy - character animation is my one, sole, natural-born talent.

That is so damn awesome DeepO, you've got skills...I can't wait to see him textured and running around ingame . Speaking of which...when you animate him, do you animate the highpoly model, the lowpoly, or both?

The usual convention is to model the frames, otherwise they'll look like posters. A lot of the Dutch master's painting look great in thief games. And Springheel could alays knock up some custom ones depicting burricks etc.