Oddity's Original Character Models?

[SneaksieDave]

Maybe I'm just drawing a blank; maybe this is impossible.

 

Do we have any of oDDity's original character models or templates or basic bodies or anything I can open and play around with in Blender? Thus it could be either ASE or LWO. I know they are md5anims, but is there a converter, or any other possible method, if in fact we don't have the originals?

 

I checked the doom3world Blender forums, and while there is apparently an md5 importer, it doesn't work for md5anims. If none of this is possible (which I'm doubting, because somehow all of this character work going on recently wouldn't be possible... I think?), then to Dram: how did you make the little bust statues in the mansion out of a character?

[New Horizon]

There are links down in the application forum for the basic lwo's. I think it might be in the thread for squawks.

[SneaksieDave]

Damn! Response in 5 mins. Nice, thx. I'm off to look.

[New Horizon]

Ha ha. That's what happens when I'm up pulling an all nighter to meet a deadline.

[ascottk]

Ha ha. That's what happens when I'm up pulling an all nighter to meet a deadline.

You too? I'm writing an essay about Native American text in choral music. I'll probably be up a while

[SneaksieDave]

Cool, this is a good start. Might be able to do something with these. Not to fizzle out the quest and question though - there's not much in here (just female pagan and dressed and city watch). Are there more? Didn't we have some ginormous 300Mb file or something with everything he's contributed? I don't have the skill to start stuff like this from scratch but maybe I can work from his stuff some to come up with modified things. Still wondering where Dram got the builder statue, too.

 

Back to the FTP; I think I remember seeing something big a while ago.

 

 

Edit: I guess this must be it in /odd_files. Downloading now.

Who knows if anything will come of this anyway. I've already taken a stab at the city watch in blender and had my enthusiasm dampened a bit. And something's screwed about coords with selections or something. Select one thing but something else gets selected. And that's without going into my lack of skillz. We'll see I guess.

[Dram]

to Dram: how did you make the little bust statues in the mansion out of a character?

 

I used milkshape's md5mesh importer to import them, I reskinned them and made them use a concrete texture, made the cylinder base and made it attach to it etc (bit of modelling) and then exported from there as a lwo. Took about 1 hour to finish.

 

Hope that helps

[OrbWeaver]

Why do you need to import the md5anims into Blender? The md5mesh should be enough to specify the geometry, after which you would have to animate it yourself if you needed motion.

 

It would be difficult to import md5anims because they are frame-based, and would have to be converted into Blender's IPOs.

[SneaksieDave]

Dram: thanks. Yep I figured the other parts; was just wondering what you used to get the files workable.

 

Orb: that's a good point, I'll try and see if I can get the importer working as well. I thought the anim might be useful to pose characters. Even something as simple as bending an arm will probably fluster a n00b such as myself.

 

I don't really know enough about this stuff to know if even my approach (or intention) is correct.

[Springheel]

Is your intention to use these to make statues or busts like Dram did? If so, that's a good thing to play around with, though you won't need any of the animation files. If you're actually intending to try and modify the characters to create new character models, that might be a pretty steep learning curve--and we still have a long list of static meshes needed....

[SneaksieDave]

The former is one of my intentions. I'm hoping to be able to reduce the complexity (greatly) and make some nicely posed statues, Thief-style only better. Preliminary tests indicate this might work well - I got a city guard down from 5000+ polys down to ~1000 polys and it wasn't bad at all. That's not the finish point of course, but it's very promising.

 

Aside from that, I'm sure some of his objects could be great starting points for new things, and also a great education.

[oDDity]

Well some of the older models are not good to learn from, I was on a learning curve to start with, and they are not very optimised and the UV maps are wild because I was using deep paint 3d to texture and didn't have unfold 3d until later.

There are two actual statue models in there somewhere, abbey_statue_01.lwo and _02. They are ones I did for a cathedral level, they are still high poly, so you'd have to build a low poly mesh around them and normal map them.

They are now quite finished, and were meant to stand against a wall so they haven't got much at the back, but you can fix that when making the low res mesh.

 

[SneaksieDave]

Yep, found those in the pack, they're awesome - they simply must be used. I didn't think of starting a new low poly mesh for them though - that's a good idea, and probably better than trying to poly-reduce it down, like I was going to do. I've had some success with poly reduce, but it can really mess some things up, too (small details, hands, etc). Hopefully I have at least adequate skill to handle the method you mention. Depending on how crazy I go with the tracing, maybe I can get them really, really low poly.

 

I look forward to what's sure to be a frighteningly complex attempt.

 

Edit: I also want to try the basic idea of taking, for instance, a builder guard and posing him, but we'll see how well that works out. None of my imagined poses are as good as the two above, and since I'm importing the LWO, I don't have bones available and don't know anything about that... so we'll see.

[oDDity]

If you're using qemLOSS or something to reduce the polys, then freeze the subpatch mesh at level 2 first

[SneaksieDave]

I'm using some seemingly decent, but not perfect, script within Blender. I'll fool around with the settings and see if something similar exists. Otherwise low poly tracing of a new model by hand should work nicely (if not better).

 

Edit: In fact, for the posed statues, I'll have to do a low poly traced model, because apparently the poly counts on the statues are higher than the script can handle - it crashes Blender.

[PinkDot]

They would look even better if they were exactly the same height - that way they would look nice on two side of some gate or whatever. At this moment one of them gets more attention then the other which breaks the symmetry effect. I wonder if correcting lowpoly model after baking normal textures would do the job (I'm thinking about increasing the size of left statue's head).

 

Apart from this minor issue - they're perfect.

[SneaksieDave]

Well I'll be damned.

 

I had a post all written out, conceding defeat of this task, but I'm rewriting it! After doing tests weeks ago to see if I could overcome the technical hurdles of this task (not the artistic ones), and then putting this off and off and off, out of plain fear of it, I tried really hard this morning. And the result sucked, completely. A complete fucking disaster.

 

I made a low poly (not low enough, in my opinion, but it's a start - 60 polys) hand to try and see if I could actually get a decent renderbump applied to it from Oddity's hipoly hand. The techniques didn't work well for me for the bell I made, and I ended up going with a handmade normalmap instead, so I didn't have much hope. And this was just a hand, so, more testing yes, but this was the real thing testing at least. The resulting normalmap was terrible. The model lit up like a xmas tree in Doom, and there is no specular to be doing that, so I was completely confused. WTF is it glowing white? The normalmap also did something I'd never seen before - instead of being comprised of shades of blue and violet/pink, it was the whole rainbow from blue to red and everything in between. Ever seen a yellow and green normalmap?

 

I assumed this was because the lowpoly hand was a really bad fit for the hipoly renderbump. And, it seems that's partially correct (it still has some yellow around the index finger curl). But in addition to the no-so-great-fit, it seems I just made an error with the seams in the UV map. Right before posting, I thought to clear the seams and try something simpler and give it one more go.

 

It worked. It's not perfect, but it's my first try on the real thing. I'll probably start over anyway, instead of just transferring this hand to a full statue attempt. And, it'll probably take me forever and make me lose even more of my sanity. And another modeller probably could do it better (or at least faster, and shouldn't hesitate to do so if they really want to, but please let me know so I don't waste my time). But hey, it worked!

 

(side by side in Blender without subsurf, and then rendered in TDM)

[Springheel]

Just a note of encouragement about this--statues are still on our list of 'things we need'.

[SneaksieDave]

I've been itching to update this thread a few times myself, thanks for the reminder.

 

I gave the models a 1% actual try, and a 99% "thought experiment" try. My best conclusion (though I'm not 100% sure ) - I don't think I'm up to it. Not with these models.

 

Reasons:

1. they're extremely hi poly, something I've got zero experience working with.

 

2. they have gaps and missing areas in them - the backs are missing (intentionally - Oddity originally said they were for alcoves, so that would save polys), the tops of heads are missing, there are gaps, e.g., under the neck to the face, etc. It is understood these are unfinished/different purpose, so that's not criticism. My point is, I don't know if I've got the skill to finish them up. Even if maybe technically, probably not aesthetically. It'd probably wind up as Oddity's beautifully sculpted Builder priest with some bastardized ugly flat misshapen area on the back of his head (or back, or robe...)

 

3. the complexity is such that they crash Blender frequently - trying to apply the subsurf, trying to separate the models, trying to even just rotate the things - I get crashes, some random, some reproducable. Both not good. So the work environment doesn't even cooperate.

 

I wasn't sure if PinkDot, above, was saying that he specifically was thinking to give them a try, or suggesting something to me, but Pink if you want a go at them, go for it - I sure won't be offended. I don't think I've given up yet, but I also don't have a lot of hope for these two statues coming from me. It would be fantastic to have nice lowpoly versions of them in game though...

 

I do still have a couple other ideas, because I want statues badly. There is the route that angua (I think?) took, of making one from scratch. I might try that, but I'll have to determine if I've got that level of skill. Another idea I had was that I would take our existing models and form them into interesting poses and prepare them that way. I've experimented some with that, and I think it might work fine. That should be the easiest method (assuming I can get good results from poly reduction), and gives me the best chance for actually succeeding at the task.

[oDDity]

I suppose I could convert these to low poly models wijht normal maps. Someone else can texture them though.

[Springheel]

That would be great if you have time, Odd. They're too good not to be used.

[SneaksieDave]

Oddity, just wondering if anything further happened with these? It might not be necessary due to another method that's being used to reduce polys and make statues out of existing characters (here). But these are awesome statues that would be a shame to waste. The prob with these two though (for me at least) was that they aren't closed in the back (so they would be limited to alcoves) and Blender barfs when I try to manipulate them to separate, poly reduce, or anything like that.