My take on a Zombie

[Bikerdude]

Guys, suggestions are fine but don't get too hung up on details. That last thing anyone wants is for Greebo to get fed-up and not make the zombie at all.

[SeriousToni]

Cool, good hint RPG!

[greebo]

Perspective projection is strange, isn't it?

 

 

 

I don't have too much freedom with regards to the skeleton, since I need to match it up against the proguard's. If the mesh differs too much, the animations will tear the mesh apart. The arm muscles are intentional, remember he's able to kill you with his bare hands after all.

 

I don't see the legs being too short.

 

That said, the head is definitely too large, and it could be lower, compared to the revenant's one. The ribcage could be widened a bit, that's true.

 

Guys, suggestions are fine but don't get too hung up on details. That last thing anyone wants is for Greebo to get fed-up and not make the zombie at all.

No problem, biker, if I were allergic against armchair modding, I wouldn't have been sticking around for almost 6 years.

[demagogue]

Looking at them side by side, it looks like maybe the shoulders might be lifted a bit too, or given a bit more bulk or a lifted clavicle or something like that, along with lowering the head a bit.

 

Are the knees & elbows a bit high on their respective limbs? That's not a length issue, but a proportion issue.

 

I understand all these things might be forced by the skeleton too.

 

Overall it looks good & functional.

[greebo]

Started toying around with the diffusemap, here's the first result:

 

 

The shot also includes the occlusion stage. It's not finished at all, and somehow I intended to create a more reddish effect, instead of the dark brown. Also beware he's hit by a yellow-ish torchlight, so this might give a warmer impression than it actually is. The teeth are all black too.

 

edit: this mesh is 2966 polys so far.

[_Atti_]

head reminds me of grim fandango:) Texture comes along nicely, really good job:)

[nbohr1more]

Looks much better with the diffuse. Can't wait to see the final result.

[greebo]

Here's another variant. The texture paint feature makes it really easy to create a truckload of alternate skins:

 

[Tels]

Here's another variant. The texture paint feature makes it really easy to create a truckload of alternate skins:

 

 

That's looking gory and good! Can't wait for it to appear in game.

[nbohr1more]

May I post this to Moddb as a "Work in-progress"?

 

Folks will love this!

[Diego]

Love that last shot!

[Springheel]

Looking good! The head in that second shot looks great.

 

The shoulders are looking a bit boxy, but that's probably due to weighting issues. Shoulders are a PITA.

[Bikerdude]

That last one if the best so far Greebs.

[Diego]

It's usually best to model in a more relaxed pose. The T pose makes it easier but doesn't yield the best results, as the character is usually with his arms down leading to stretching and weird shapes.

Edited August 18, 2012 by Diego

[greebo]

Here's the current state, it's pretty much done as first version. There are a few imperfections, but I've had enough for today.

 

 

2 Skins, visible mesh is a bit above 3000 polys, shadow mesh is 936 polys. I can shove it into SVN tomorrow, if Springheel is ok with this version.

[Springheel]

I can shove it into SVN tomorrow, if Springheel is ok with this version.

 

I wouldn't mind trying a few animations on these guys. Do you mind if I have a go at adjusting the shoulder weighting?

[Melan]

The dried out skin looks terrific. Something about the mouth seems a bit off, but it is hard to verbalise much. Too round, maybe?

[greebo]

I wouldn't mind trying a few animations on these guys. Do you mind if I have a go at adjusting the shoulder weighting?

I would't mind at all. I can upload it over the next few days. Beware though that if you adjust the weights on the .md5mesh directly, then my Blender source file will be unusable for future changes (like any mesh changes or tweaks in bone positions), since it would export the "old" weighting and overwrite yours. Right now I just hit File > Export and it's in-game. Just hit reloadModels and the changes are there, very convenient. If you take over it's basically in your hands and I can't do any work on the Blender file anymore.

 

edit: I can do a few tweaks if you tell me specifics.

[Nosslak]

It might be too late to change, but I think you should try to make the knees and elbows a little thicker. It would probably make his limbs look more interesting and it would be more realistic (as there's more bone there so it would be less sunken in). I think the armpit should be moved down a little bit too.

[Springheel]

Beware though that if you adjust the weights on the .md5mesh directly, then my Blender source file will be unusable for future changes

 

Yes, that's a bit of a problem. If I find better shoulder values I'll see if I can report them back somehow so you can modify the original.

 

Damn you proprietary formats!

[greebo]

We can try that, yes.

 

The files are in SVN now, I've added all my sources to model_src too.

[Springheel]

Tried it out in game.

 

1. My god, does it ever look freaky when they start running around at full speed...I bet they're still inheriting the spawnarg that speeds up their run animation (because the old zombie just had a sped-up walk for running).

 

2. The zombie looks better in game than it does in screenshots, especially in low light.

 

3. There are a few issues though. And unfortunately, I can't import that md5mesh. Don't know why, but I get an error when I try it. I took some pics with a few of the issues. There appears to be a lot of visible seams in several of the joints. Don't know if it's the texture or something odd with the mesh.

 

In the image below:

 

- Something is wrong with the teeth. There is lots of z-fighting on them and they aren't taking light properly.

- There is a strange seam between the hand and fingers...this is the worst example, but there were a few other places

- at the elbow seam, I could actually see through the mesh--may need to weld some verts there

- that dark triangle on the arm (top right) looked like it was z-fighting. Might be from shadowmesh too close to surface

- hands and feet had strange black areas that did not react to light.

- strong ankle seam

 

- Did you plan on making the head a separate mesh? It's not essential, but there are two benefits that I can see:

 

1. Easy variety by switching heads (also allows zombie heads to be used on other characters)

2. Would allow head animations (so mouth can move, at least)

 

It would create a seam, though it looks like there's already one there in the texture, so that might be a natural place to separate the two meshes.

 

As far as the shoulder thing I was going to try and address, see the second image below. The current version has football shoulders. I think it would look better more like the right version. That would probably mean weighting the arms one loop further towards the shoulder.

 

I'll work a bit more and see if I can figure out how to open the md5mesh...it's just text, so I don't know what the problem is. Maybe if I change the formatting by hand it would work.

[Springheel]

Well, I tried formatting the md5mesh manually, and I was able to get it to actually open in Lightwave...unfortunately it looked like this (below).

 

Deep Exploration won't even recognize .blend or .md5mesh files, so it doesn't look like I'll be able to do anything with this guy.

[demagogue]

Considering Blender is free to download, there is still the possibility of biting the bullet and installing and opening it in Blender. I realize the learning curve since you haven't used it like LW, but it's for tweaking this, not like you're building a whole new model. Maybe that's more in the realm of reasonable...

 

Edit: It's odd that Deep Exploration -- of all the formats it takes -- doesn't recognize .blend files though, considering that's one of the actual open source ones!

[greebo]

I was pondering about writing a "Character A-Z in Blender" tutorial on the wiki when all this is done, it's really not that hard once you got all the pieces.

 

As for the problems above, after quite some research it turned out that Blender's normal bake is not working like I need it to, since it doesn't consider the tangent vectors correctly. I gave the built-in "renderbump" a shot and while it takes over 1.5 hours to bake the normal it looks very good now (Blender's bake process is done in about a minute, but it's wrong). And I have to re-paint the diffusemap from scratch.

 

The rest of the problems is weighting issues.

 

As for opening the .md5mesh file it's probably best if that doesn't work, since the lowpoly mesh in Blender has still all the edge loops intact, so it's far easier to work with that, compared to the triangulated .md5mesh output.