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Boiler Bot


DeepOmega

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So as I'm about to post in a more appropriate forum, I have returned from.. well, from real life I suppose. Will post explaining elsewhere, but for now, something relevant.

 

I've felt badly about my lack of content creation - aside from a few bits and small models, the biggest thing I ever did was that thief, which we scrapped anyway. So I decided that before posting, I'd spend a week whipping up a new model for this mod. Thus do I present: the boilerbot.

 

boilerbot1.jpg

 

boilerbot2.jpg

 

boilerbot3.jpg

 

I'm pretty happy with the modeling. The normal is decent, if a bit rough in some areas - but the talented texture painters can certianly take a gander at it, see if they can't clean it up in some places and roughen it up in others. I'd like to add an embossed mechanite logo somewhere, too.

 

Comments and crits welcome. She weighs in at 3300 or so polys. A bit heavy, but it's gonna be a rare enemy anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal. I plan to try to texture it, too, but wanted to post now that the normal is roughly done. Also note - right now it has a sort of flamethrower nozzle deal going on in its mouth. This is quite changeable. A cannon looks ridiculous, tho. In addition, I dropped in a crazy hinge-type deal inside the head cowling, so the head can justifiably look up and down and left and right. The neck is designed to retract (I guess I should add a normal mapped thingy to justify it at some point).

 

Anyway - I hope this'll help me get more into the flow here. Good to be modelling here again.

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I have no idea how something can look so awesome yet so goofy at the same time...yet somehow you've managed to pull it off. :P

 

I had the same problem with Fish's concept, it's got bits and pieces that are great, but it needs something added to make it look a little less ackward.

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I like it, it's got a genuine T2 feeling about it. If we come up wiht some other bots that veer away from the T2 designs, it'll be nice ot have this T2-ish one among them.

I think it should have a separate tube running under the neck from the boiler to the mouth, for shooting the hot steam from - I don't think it should shoot flame, it should shoot boiling steam.

3200 is not heavy, most of my characters are between 4 and 5k polys.

As long as you use the extra polys wisely and you can actually see the extra quality in the model becasue of them, it's ok, just as long as you don't waste polys where you can't see the difference anyway.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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I like it, too -- has the T2 feel to it. It looks a little awkward, though -- as maybe he'd tip over on his head. But maybe that's what's giving him character? I just see a baancing issue.

 

There was an idea to give bi-pedal bots an extra joint -- similar to how an animal's hind legs work. Not sure what everyone else wants though. I admit my sketch here isn't the best, and we all agree it shouldn't look like he's wearing Nike's®, but maybe this helps to show you what I mean:

 

bot.jpg

 

Source: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...indpost&p=32776

 

I also feel your bot should have bigger, more stable foot pads.

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Yeah - goofy & awesome - that's the T2 robot style. Part of what makes them scarey for me - they are so clumsy yet so powerful and the weild this power with boneheaded determination.

 

I always liked that concept art for the bot - and you seem to have capture the feel very well DeepOmega. I like this one :)

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Awesome job, my only crit is that I feel some object, like a mid-sized tube or some miscellaneous metal shape should go in this location: I feel it would balance the character shape out more smoothly since the thin neck makes it a bit less intimidating.

 

boilerbot1.JPG

 

It could also be some complicated tubing instead of a solid mass.

 

tube1.jpg

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A bot concept of mine.. animation looks strange but not(only:) ) because i messed it up but i wanted it this way..so its more clockwork machine than mech...howver thats just concept..an idea..could be worked out better

 

check at_bot.avi on ftp concepts folder(cant give link i use total commander to browse ftp..dunno how to get links out of that)

 

about turning there is a rotatable cylinder on its bottom...all legs rise up(the body lowers) which means the bottom reaches the floor.. it turns into direction than it can start walking

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THE feet do need to be made bigger though.

 

Definitely. If anyone wants to give me, uh, foot designs? That'd be awesome. I spent a while working on them but I'm not really happy - they look too scrawny. I do kinda like the ball and socket ankle joint, tho, as it gives a suitably ridiculous way for them to turn (shuffling, spinning steps).

 

how are you making the little ornaments on the boiler/head?

 

Using the true majesty of normal mapping. I found a fantastic high-rez pic of an engraved stock on a gun. I took it into photoshop, ran it through high pass filters and contrast adjustments until it was a nice approximation of a grayscale height map. Brought that into 3DS Max and dropped it on a plane, rendering it out to a normal map. Technically this is dumb, as it defeats the point of normal mapping, but because it was so high rez, when I scaled it down in photoshop it still had lots of detail, making this worthwhile. Finally, I used photoshop a LOT to clean up the etchings, make them more legible, and so forth.

 

Very nice, I assume you used the concept art I made as a reference for that? wink.gif

 

Yes. :)

 

Awesome job, my only crit is that I feel some object, like a mid-sized tube or some miscellaneous metal shape should go in this location: I feel it would balance the character shape out more smoothly since the thin neck makes it a bit less intimidating.

 

I actually really like the idea of adding a hose or tube of some sort to that area. Animating it might be a bit obnoxious, tho. I'll play around with boning and see ifI can get some good results.

 

Glad you guys approve. I'm still technically working 40 hour weeks, so I'll tweak some more tonight once I'm home. Keep the crits and suggestions coming.

 

Oh, and for those keeping score, this is a single 1024x1024 map.

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There's no doubt that the bot couldn't walk in reality. As soon as it lifted one leg, it would topple over.

Of course, with animation you can make anything balance.

Atti, that bot of yours would be way too slow, and there's no way it could walk faster using that mechanism.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

character models site

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There's  no doubt that the bot couldn't walk in reality. As soon as it lifted one leg, it would topple over.

Of course, with animation you can make anything balance.

Atti, that bot of yours would be way too slow, and there's no way it could walk faster using that mechanism.

 

Yeah, it's unfortunate that it's hard to make hip joints that look steampunky. I played with the idea briefly, but to no avail. It looks too effective to be powered by steam.

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well its not for chasing thiefs,but i think they would do well since they can drop on the floor in a sec then all they need to do is make some noise,send radiosignals to alert other bots around,rotate in direction and shoot bolts..and if you make it to a corner.. well its slowly starts moving.. and the other alerted bots will be closing too.. (faster ones too..i guess we dont want only one type of bot)

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For all of our movie format issues (which come up all the time - heck, I had missed most of them thanks to 56k and lacking codecs), one could just go here:

 

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

 

Get the player (command line) and then the essentials codecs, and you can play any and every format available. The only time this doesn't work, is if someone has released a new codec, and the mplayer staff haven't yet incorporated it into the essentials pack. And yes, that's everything - mpg, mov, avi, even stupid real format.

 

Not to mention, wav, mp3, ogg, etc etc etc, with the ability to stream and dump (steal) streaming media.

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boilerbot4.jpg

 

boilerbot5.jpg

 

New feet whoo. Also added some pipery to the neck area. Can you taste the excitement?

 

I'm pretty happy with these feet. They seem to strike that balance between preposterous and monstrous. On the one hand.. giant chicken feet? What? But this whole thing has this sort of psychotic bird body shape to it. It feels right. Comments and crits welcome, by the way.

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I'm pretty sure those details are already as a bumpmap.

 

Deep O, it's not particularly the size of the feet that matter, but rather their position, even with larger feet, your model would have balance issues, the feet should be more centered, ala:

 

legfix.jpg

http://www.thirdfilms. com

A Thief's Path trailer is now on Youtube!

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No, the size of the feet were an issue, too.

 

I'm not too fond of the feet as it makes the robot look more like a chicken than it already did. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to think of and mock-up anything different right now. I'm working on the audio track I mentioned I was working on a while back.

 

GIMG - Angling them inwardly like that will bring other balancing issues into play. To me, it wouldn't really solve anything. If it was a fast runner I can see how the center of gravity might be okay for that design to work, but not as a slow, lumbering patrol bot.

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Deep O, it's not particularly the size of the feet that matter, but rather their position, even with larger feet, your model would have balance issues, the feet should be more centered, ala:

 

While you're right about balance issues, I actually like the idea of this precarious, ungainly, tottering robot. I imagine it's gait being very quick, short steps - like the combots in thief 2.

 

Canting the legs inwards wouldn't work in terms of the knee joint. If we were to do it the way they did the originals, the legs would be almost underneath it. Personally, I like this almost birdlike design. It's very weird, and very disorienting. Again, these quick, bird motions keep coming to mind.

 

Also, yes, this is normal-mapped. I don't even have a high poly model. I don't like doing high polys of mechanical things. They almost never line up, and you get subtle but noticeable distortions of hard edges. Instead, I have a huige pallette of prerendered pipes, vents, and so forth that I drop in in photoshop.

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