Hammer Guard Wip

[mrDischarged]

Looks really good, but the wrist movement should be more obvious, the movement as it is now resembles a rowing-like movement. Try to make him extend the sword more by tilting the wrist a bit.

 

mrD

[DeepOmega]

Hey, Oddity - there seems to be some way crazy shit going on in the face of the low-poly. A jumble of triangles, and totally unsymetrical. Is this just a temporary model?

[oDDity]

I did't want to miror the face. I used a poly reducing plugin on the face because I wanted to keepthe original geometry shape and UV map. I suppose it could be reduced furthur by hand if I was bothered.

No one's goign to be looking at the wireframe of it anyway.

[DeepOmega]

Yeah, I thought it was a poly-reducing plugin... It really looks like it. While nobody's gonna be looking at the wireframe, If we end up wanting to do anything with facial animation, it really needs to get cleaned up. Polys reduced by hand and that sort of thing. I'm a bit concerned about the profile polygons, too, since it's got such a weird topology.

 

For intance, here, the nose looks way zany.

 

And in the wire.. if you can't see the shapes in the wireframe, them you're bound to run into issues, especially if you end up having to animate it. While using per-pixel lighting reduces the most obvious artifacts (none of this vertex lighting) there are all sorts of smoothing errors and such, which a clean wireframe will fix right up.

[oDDity]

If you merge verts and set smooting to 180 those problems will be fixed.

Max has a habit of unwelding the points along UV borders on imported objects.

We ain't gonna be doing no HL2 lip sync. It'll be a basic basic bone setup. THat's unless you fancy setting up a really complex facial animation bone setup.

For ther movie cutscenes we can use vetex animation in a 3d app. In-game, you're not really going to up close and personal with the AI anyway.

[oDDity]

...

[DeepOmega]

Fair enough - but nonetheless, that nasty wireframe really has me worried. Would it be that hard to just hand-optimize?

[oDDity]

Not hard, just time consuming, and I've got more than enough to do here already (currently 4 new charcaters to model and the blacjjack anims, and make the recruting poster), not to mention I'm still modeling characters for Nightblade and doing dinosaurs for Doc Murchison. Pus I'm tryign to take some time out to learn proper charcater animation techniques ATM.

Edited January 31, 2005 by oDDity

[oDDity]

I also changed the design of the guard a little, seeing as how the old one is now our official 'uncle gay', the team mascot.

 

[New Horizon]

Very nice! This must be Uncle Gay's cousin Straight.

[Springheel]

I like the addition of the collar. Makes them seem that much more uptight.

 

edit: There's a red stripe down his side that makes it look like the metal covers only the front, is that intentional?

[oDDity]

In game... a sonmewhat younger guy, but there' s no reason why they all have to be pensioners. Having different aged ones will be good as well having fat and short ones.

Edited May 3, 2005 by oDDity

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Woah. Better than i expected, but i suppose i should have expected that

[BlackThief]

yeah looks pretty damn good. and he doesn't look too young to me, I'd guess him about 22-25.

[Macsen]

Brilliant! I've always been unsure about the layered metal skirt on his armour, but otherwise it looks great. Nice to see the feet have been scaled down as well.

[New Horizon]

Right on! Fantastic!

[Springheel]

Looks great, although there seems to be a transparency issue between his legs at the moment.

[oDDity]

Yeah, it's pain in the ass the way the render works. Making a surface double sided means it won't cast any shaows, so I'll have to waste polys actually modeling the other side.

Also, since self shadowing looks like shit on all models in doom,I have to make a separate shader for, in this case, the underside polys of the shoulder pads, the inside polys of the skirt, ans the inside polys of the bottom layer of the armour trim. I don't know if having separate shders ppointing tp the same textures casues any performace hit, but probably not.

[oDDity]

I've also been having a go at doing walk cycles from scratch - this is my first one. I think it looks better than the mo-capped one on the previous page :/

IT does look a bit gay though. Let's face it, these Builders are a bunch of raving poofters. Uncle Gay was no freak.

 

[oDDity]

Is it just my browser or is that gif playing in slow motion? It's not playing at the same speed as animation shop or in irfanview.

[Fingernail]

A bit slow, but ey, looks alright. Call it bullet time.

[oDDity]

That's weird, I just changed it to play at 'Benny Hill' speed, and it still looks the same slow speed in IE and Opera.

[Ishtvan]

It looks good to my uneducated eye. There is one thing: maybe it's just this crappy monitor, but it looks like the bottom of the cuirass, the metal part at the hip seems to be sort've elongating with the step. Maybe it just looks that way because it's rotating though.

[Springheel]

That part would be flexible and is probably tilting back and forth. The only issue I see is that it looks like the red skirt comes through the armour briefly at that point

[oDDity]

Yes, that's a weighting issue. THe problem is if I don't have the thigh bone influence the curaiss there, the leg will cut through it when the knee raises. I didn't pay much attetion to the weighting for this animation test, this is just for my educational puposes.

The curaiss will have to remain a little bendy though, but not that much.