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hey guys. just checking back at the forum to let you guys know that i'm still here and awaiting directions. i've only started looking around the dark mod forums, but havent yet seen everything, ill continue on to see what resources / info is available. well, fingernail or whoever's in charge , when you have some work for me, just email. thanks . btwy, forums is an ok way to get informed, but what we really need is an irc channel.

Look, you taffer: You need to make one that's about 500 polys, but you also need to make a heavily detailed one that's at least 10,000 polys for normalmap reference. And you need both. IRC

I think the hood should poke out over his face a bit more, to allow a shadow to more easily cast over his forehead/face. Part of the plan was to make him mysterious by always casting some shadow over his face, in conjunction with the cloth scarf thing over his nose/mouth. Garrett lacked a lot of mystique in TDS because they kept showing his whole face in the light in cutscenes, etc. By having a hood that pokes out more, this would help create more dramatic shadow effects over his face. There might be some cloak-wearing StarWars Jedi or Sith we could look at for reference. This is the only example I have to somewhat show what I'm talking about, though I don't think this fully captures the ideal. I think it should jut out a bit more and fall vertically lower than what is shown here:

Don't forget to look at the links, not just the pretty pictures (there is a limit on IMG tags in a post). Anyway, onwards: Weapon Models Bow Arrow (just broadhead for now) - figure 146, not 147. Short Sword Blackjack - you know what this looks like. I'd prefer less of a T3 club to more of a T2 style hard material thing. More coming....

This might be true, but what is their function now? They guard the churches and the property owned by the church. I don't know how you know this, but I'm going by the art that is actually in (or used by) the game. The T1/2 armour is late-medieval. The T3 armour is lighter and less modern. None of them look arcane to me. Says who? None of the hammerite pictures I have ever seen have had them with cloaks. The T3 hammers did not have shoulder plates, and I'm not sure the T1/2 did either. If you have access to some Thief reference pictures that I don't, please share them.

If you want to stay free, use Blender (someone wrote an exporter for D3).... You could learn Lightwave and I'm sure it's great, but I think there has been an exporter written for 3DSMax also. Not sure though...check the D3W forums.

Good job on the builder concept, Springheel -- and thanks for posting the historic reference material, Alexius. Hey Springheel - I added a new folder to the DarkMod FTP area called "Art-ConceptDrawings," and within that folder added a "Springheel" folder and a "Darkness_Falls" folder. This gives us our own separate playgrounds to keep track of stuff in without getting confused. Alexius, if you'll be doing concept drawings and need webspace, feel free to add a folder there. We could add other folders, too, if other artists come on board. I wanted to keep only drawings in there, but realistically we may want to re-title the folder and morph into more of a Art-ConceptArtwork area. You guys may already have webspace and don't care, but I needed the webspace.

Right on, yeah I agree with all that was said. I'll try to get them to be smaller images later tonight or tomorrow, and have the images show up in the post instead of as links. Good idea! Not a problem. [uPDATE: Done.] I agree that the room is bland and I actually, honestly, kind've hate it. It looks better in-person, when standing way far away (LOL) -- actually kind've looks real. BUT (and this is a big BUT) it does lack A LOT of the dynamicism and moodiness we all know and love about Thief. Fortunately, I already realized this and won't be doing another room like that I think I did that room as almost a "study," if you will. I was using Thief 2 as a reference and was seeing how they did the panels on the wall, etc., though I know I erred on a couple things. When i look at that room though, I'm like 'borrrrring' I have a feeling the drawings will get better over time. I'm actually working on a different room scene right now that I think you might appreciate more when I'm done. There's more life and moodiness, in general, to it -- and it feels more Thief to me. I'm using PhotoShop and the coloring will be much better. Once I get a digital pen, I have a feeling you'll be seeing a lot more cooler things, too. Thanks for the feedback guys. Let's rock this thing!

I like what I see so far If you artist guys are using lots of reference material from the appropriate time periods, and making design desicions based on the Thief world that we want, I'm happy. Just as a suggestion - have you thought about adding bolts or screws to the logo, if you're having trouble putting a hammer with one other thing, some little things like bolts could give you more options to arrange things to look nice. After we come up with a design, we should read some "meaning" into it, eg, the cog surrounds the base of the hammer, to represent its power that spreads over everything... etc. so the Builders have more things to write about.

I think perhaps I'll have to pick up Blender to carry us over our lack of 3D team....that is, only one modeller. Adverts have gone on D3W, ttlg & polycount: any of you advertise on any other suitable forums too.

Presumably you're making a sort of mid-poly version, which can be scaled up for the highpoly bumpmap reference, and down for the low-poly ingame mesh, right? Because the highpoly one can afford to have veins, seams, threads, buttons, creases, the whole caboodle of detail. So it's probably best to start in the middle, which is what is looks like you've done. Good work.

The face sketch is here: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=S...3&st=0#entry796 I wasn't sure whether a side view was necessary...if you'd like one just let me know.

I placed a few sound samples from my keyboard over in the Art > Sound > Sound Effects/Music > "Sound Effects, Ambience, Music" thread. Please check out that post: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?act=S...=findpost&p=779

Hmm, something does look familiar about it to me. Maybe it was only used in certain books or certain notes lying around? Here's the post I got it from: http://forums.ionstorm.com/index.php?showt...ndpost&p=355674

Doom 3 comes packaged with the level editor in the executable. All you have to do to access it is rightclick on the Doom 3 shortcut, click on properties, and add "com_allowConsole 1 +set r_fullscreen 0 +editor" in the target box after the quotation marks. But if you mean how we've made all the test maps, well...we've got lots of stuff down in the (currently?) hidden sections of the forums that go through it all step by step. It's a long process that'll probably bore the hell out of everyone not interested in the technical side of the mod. And yeah, the SDK will be free. As for the Garrett model...I think DeepOmega has been doing it in 3DSMax, not too sure though.

Hello, I offered my help on the coding side on the old forums. Until the SDK comes out, a lot of the stuff I'd like to get started on will have to wait. As a result, I was only periodically checking the old boards, and only just now saw the message regarding this move. I'm still more than willing to offer my help on the coding side. I'm mostly interested in helping with AI, and movement code (Mantling, run/walk/sneak/crouch modifications). I'm also willing to help anywhere else that requires it. Even Art. Sorry for not posting anything for a while, but until the SDK comes out, a large number of things are simply speculation at this point. -oofnish

Hey, not bad at all, Fingernail. Once you get done you'll need to post a tut on how you did it so we can all join in on the fun (wow, that rhymed). Oh yeah, a nice tip on making specularmaps. I went through your mini tutorial and make my first specmap by just making a darkened greyscale image of the material I wanted to shinyize. Thing is once you're done with it the lighting will end up being too uniform across the surface and won't look quite as realistic as it should... The solution to that problem is surprisingly easy. To fix that, just make your greyscale image as usual, add a render cloud on a new layer, gaussian blur it a bit til the clouds don't look quite like clouds anymore, tweak it til you're happy with the results, then blend the layers (I used overlay, but quite a few of the blend filters will work). Instant nonuniform specular map, the end results are alot better and you only need basic photoshop knowledge to do it.

Hi there guys! This is Jim from DoomCast.com. I've been talking to Fingernail and offered him hosting and some space on our forums! Just wanted to say hello and meet the people who are going to bring out this awsome thief mod! I still remember the first time I played thief, lol, getting chased around the first manor and scrambling up a rope to hide hahaha Hopefully this mod turns out great! Anyway, gtg Jim Doomcast

I'm not a part of the Dark Mod team actually, I can't code, do models or textures anyway. Kinda dedicated to Black Cat Games aswell... I'm just hosting the forums for Fingernail and the crew.

Don't apologise Phil Are you refering to the post you made about mods and Quake 3 being released under the GPL? If not, I have probably missed something and you can ignore the bit below ID have re-released the source code for Quake 3 and some of its other games (including the previous incarnations of Doom) as open source under the GPL - but only years after the games were originally released (Quake 3 was only GPLed a few weeks ago, after the release of Doom 3). While the titles are considered commercially viable they are distributed with a closed source license. It will be years before ID even consider releasing Doom 3 under the GPL. ID normally ask that fan made material is distributed freely and non commercially. Don't get me wrong. I'd encourage anyone to be as open with licensing and copyright as possible. I'm a linux user, a fan of the GPL and am contributing to open source projects. But the GPL is not the appropriate license for a Doom 3 mod, they are incompatible in a legal licensy kind of way.

A little. I was looking through the forum sections but I found nothing suitable. So we need a list of sounds that we will need. We should compile this list and post it in the design documents forum for reference. I guess a SciFi Mars research base has not so much need for carpets.

Specular maps are easy. My mini-specular tutorial. Go back to your diffuse (colour) map. Desaturate it (greyscale). Use brightness/contrast to alter the shininess and lack of shininess (black = matte, white = very shiny), dependant on the material. Black out, add in manually any extra bits you want especially shiny/matte. Then save it with the suffix _s and add the line "specularmap doom3/base/textures/blahblah" to the material definition.

There is a fan-made 'patch' which removes reference to the textures which don't function, I believe. Specular is more use for metal anyhow.

Have you uploaded the textures with normalmaps and one big material text file, to the ftp? It's much better if we stick to one definitive version of stuff, so we'll use your versions of BT's textures as you made the normalmaps by hand, rather than mine. So upload them!

Wow...we really need to start digging up info on light materials. I just got through playing around with a few of them and, except for the frequency, I've caused it to put on an excellent lightning display. You could do so much with it and use only a minimal amount of resources. Want a shadowy silhouette of some trees swaying slowly in a breeze displayed on your windows ? Use a light material. The same could go for casting the same shadow on a wall opposite of a window during a lightning storm...have a tree cast a shadow when a bolt of lightning lights up the sky. You could even have clouds rolling slowly across your floors. There's so much potential here for awesomeness it's not even funny.