Noble Man Character

[New Horizon]

About the animations, does that mean all the animations for this nobleman would have to be made individually? Does he share the same rigging with any other characters? I'm waffling a bit about whether this AI is good enough quality to use compared to the others, and if all the animations for it would have to be made from scratch, that would definitely be a knock against it.

 

Begin animation philosophy rant:

I'm not saying this to be critical, but we have to be realistic--in the last six months we have only had three or four new animations added to our list (not counting ones that have been applied to new models). And most of our existing animations are still WIP. If we maintain that speed, it would take us at least five more years just to get through the absolute basic animations.

 

Unless we're going to get more animators signing up, we have to do everything we can to lighten the animation load, and sharing animations seems the number one way to do that. If a model simply can't share animations, then maybe it's not worth having.

 

Other opinions?

 

If I'm understanding what ascottk said, then the animations are still shared...it's just the rigging that has to be tweaked to work with different meshes.

 

I don't know a lot about how the d3 animations work, but my inclination was that we would need to take a T3 approach to sharing animations. Break them down into male/ female/ creature and then create some kind of base_animationname.md5anim files. If possible, all the characters would point to the base_ set of animations and not have their own individual sets. I have no idea if that's even possible with the D3 setup. The T3 system was wonderfully generic, as all their AI were essentially the same model...they just varied in how chubby they were and all the armor was attached to a 'basic' AI body. If we really wanted to go crazy, we could break down our AI models to a very basic form with no armor, and further enhance our attachment system to work like T3. One set of animation files could likely be linked for each class of AI then.

 

Again, I know little of how it works...but I thought the T3 setup was pretty smart.

[New Horizon]

Then we can share animations but the meshes must have to be roughly the same size.

 

 

As usual, ascottk is able to say what I'm thinking...in far more eloquent terms.

 

To back up what ascottk said...yup, we would need to make our AI more generic. Personally, I don't have a problem with that if it means our mod can be more efficient and lessen the animation workload in the long run.

 

Ascottk, my life is starting to get back in order, if you need someone to help you out with this...I can definitely try my hand at it. I would like to learn how to do this stuff. I received my new video card today, now I just have to wait for another few days for the power supply...it was on back order. Once I have this stuff installed, I should be good to go.

[ascottk]

Totally revamped nobleman. He now uses the citywatch skeleton thus is now using the citywatch's animations.

 

Spring: Are you sure the def_head offset is correct? The head is sunk into his body on my end.

 

EDIT: I also rigged in the Left Hips_Dummy & RightHips_Dummy for attachments.

[Springheel]

Spring: Are you sure the def_head offset is correct? The head is sunk into his body on my end.

 

I set up a few heads so they looked good, and set the tdm_head_pretty_old one as the default for now (since the head that came with it is unusable without some serious remodelling). The D3 heads all look pretty good on my end. Here's a screen of how they look here:

 

 

Could it have something to do with the new skeleton (I haven't downloaded that yet)?

[SneaksieDave]

Not bad at all! I wish he wasn't so damned tall. He's like a lanky spider. I like my noblemen soft and wimpy! I can picture a shorter noble guy with his hands on his hips, looking UP to see an elite merc's face, and telling him off.

[Crispy]

First we're complaining that he's too thuggish, now that he's too tall... geez, leave the poor animation guys alone.

 

Seriously though, I think it's fine. Nobles should be tall, since they would have been better fed than other people (as a rule). And lankiness is good because it suggests that they're physically weak (as opposed to guards, anyway).

 

He's looking awesome now! Great work, ascottk and Springheel. Doesn't look cartoonish at all any more.

 

Totally revamped nobleman. He now uses the citywatch skeleton thus is now using the citywatch's animations.

Eeeexcellent.

[Ishtvan]

I like the texture, but something still seems not quite right about him. One thing that bothers me is that he carriers his arms too far out to the side. The angle of his upper arms seem perpetually bent out, as if he were carrying two stacks of books under his arms. This persists even in the ragdoll state, which makes me think maybe it has to do with the model or underlying joint structure rather than any specific anim AscottK gave him.

 

Disclaimer: This comment was made based on how he looked yesterday, before Ascottk's changes today.

[Macsen]

Out of proportion limbs and a strange, lumbering gait? Remove his chin and he'll be your average, in-bred nobleman.

[New Horizon]

I had always looked forward to seeing an oDDity created Nobleman. It would have been sweet.

[ascottk]

How's this for a nobleman head?

 

No normal maps yet . . . except for the hair . . . ditto . . .

[Springheel]

I think the face would work as a nobleman with a bit more tweaking (adding definition to the ear, some normal-maps, etc). The hair though, doesn't really work for me. We don't really have any good hair models as reference, do we? The houseguard's isn't great either, and I don't think Odd had any male heads with hair. I've been trying to improve the houseguard's and found it quite difficult to get looking decent.

 

The problem with that hair above is that the texture looks too smeared, and the colour changes look fairly random. Maybe using an actual photo of hair would help?

[ascottk]

The problem with that hair above is that the texture looks too smeared, and the colour changes look fairly random. Maybe using an actual photo of hair would help?

I used a photo of my hair then tweaked it. I think the uv map could be tweaked though (shrink it so there's more detail).

[Springheel]

Yeah, hair texture needs to be pretty large to look half-way decent, otherwise it looks like just a smear of colour. Dark hair is also easier to do than light, because you can hide a lot of the detail.

[Darkness_Falls]

Maybe using an actual photo of hair would help?

I might recommend Trump's hair...

 

[ascottk]

How's this?

I'm using a normal map with a height map with this shot & the uv map on the hair is stretched out to bring more detail.

[Crispy]

Hair looks a bit shiny... I don't know if that's specular or just from the diffuse texture. Something's going on with his lips too. The bumpiness of the skin is definitely an improvement though.

[ascottk]

I worked on the diffuse map to bring it closer to oDD's style:

 

Stupid ear normals were better in the last shot. If I try to bring them out more then the details will be too bumpy. I think the noble is an alcoholic thus a reddish nose

[Domarius]

I think what you noticed about the lips is that the geometry doesn't fit the texture. The red bit of the lips is too small to cover the actual geometry of the lips - just the bottom lip I think. I'd be modifying the geometry, since the texture looks okay.

[Crispy]

Yeah, you're right, I think that's the problem. Seems obvious now that you've pointed it out!

[Springheel]

It's definitely coming along. The colouring is spot on.

 

The hair is improved, though something still looks off to me, as if there is just flat brown underneath the blondish bits. Don't have any good suggestions atm though.

 

In that shot the normal-map of the skin looks a bit overdone for a nobleman. He looks *very* weathered. Though that might be because of the closeness of the shot--players won't usually be that close so it might look fine from a distance.

 

The only easy improvement I can suggest is darkening the eyebrows. Right now they look more like smudges then actual hair.

[ascottk]

Fixed mesh & uv map on the face, modified normals, and new hair texture:

The uv map on the hair needs fixed The texture isn't quite aligned on the lips

[Springheel]

It's still getting better.

[ascottk]

Well, that's the best I can do as far a uv mapping:

He'll be up on cvs.

 

I'll have to do something with that hair mesh

[Crispy]

That's a huge improvement since I last commented, good work.

 

The lips and hair could still do with some tweaking, but it's not too serious. This will work great for the nobleman!

[Springheel]

Is the latest version on CVS? This is what I see right now (next to the builder priest for comparison), but it doesn't look as good as your last post up there.