Intro

A monster from Stand: the Merge of Powers (Quake 2 Total Conversion) converted to a ppm. Hopefully, some incredible story can be generated about this character soon. [authors readme]

Well here it is, Shines' 3rd model, out of 5 so far, released to our grubby hands.  Total development time was just under 3 months of painstaking revisions to just about every aspect of the model.. Every time he thought he had it close to what he wanted.. *scrap*, start over..  Its a good thing too since Baron had a bunch of issues here and there which for the most part have been either fixed or edited to a much more acceptable level.. Now don't get me wrong, as talented as this young author is, there are a few problem areas this "humanoid hybrid" has, but it certainly won't take away from some fraggin' fun and from most of us looking forward to  STAND: tMoP ...

The Model

For starters, shine took the common method of creating a segmented model. It is comprised of 6 individual parts (a head, 2 arms, 2 shoulder pads, and a body)  Many pluses with constructing a model in this fashion, ease of design, animation, parts can be reused and altered to create other meshes   etc.. Drawbacks.. hmm, not many, one I will touch on are slightly higher polycounts.  Now at 610 polygons, Baron is not going to slow your system by any means, in fact today's more powerful systems and video cards, you can probably handle a model with close to double this number.  Yet segmentation tends to "waste" a number of faces which may have been used for other detailing of the model.  Models with facecounts of 600-700 could be incredibly detailed with good use of polygons.   Baron is still a very nice job, though I would have likes to see the author use some more polygons to make a less pointed and more humanoid set of hands so they would hold the weapon rather than have that "glued" look.  The custom weapon is a nice touch, as the author pointed out, the models stance and movement, doesn't accurately illustrate the weapons apparent weight, but that's a "gimme" in my book. (No deduction that is..)  I had to look at the model 100x over since something looked odd.. From the side Barons proportions look fairly correct for a human(oid). Yet from the front, the groin area was extremely low (Be must have some huge set of..)  Actually this is a bit minor, yet with the bone setup for animation, his rear-end deformed sort of nastily in a few cycles.
Score: Seven

The Animations

I must admit, our young author has greatly improved his skills here ( and from what I've seen of his work lately, has even sharpened his abilities past Baron.)As mentioned above, the bone setup could have been tweaked a bit, and so could the vertex assignment.The "gluteus maximus" is where the bad deformations occur in the pain1,2,3 cycles. My best guess is that the pelvis bones were not centered to the mesh's pelvis thus it causes it to bend and deform in an unnatural way. Agreeing with shine, the shoulder pads were an imperfect area too. Being segmented, they weren't attached to the torso in many of the animation and they did tend to swivel and rotate a bit too much with simple arm movements.  Some of the areas of the model that should be rigid (like the armored chest plate) did bend in a few cycles but no big deal there (another gimme)  The run animation was fairly nice, as was the death 3 animation.  In the latter the secondary motion of the arms swaying behind the falling body was extremely well done. The "crouch attack"  frames have some weird jiggle and twist on the right thigh Baron does tend to 'sink" below the floor level during many cycles, but his large booted feet mask this fault well. The wave cycle shows Baron lifting his weapon and crashing it down on the floor in front of him, and the left shin clips the foot and instep severely, but again, not so noticeable in gameplay unless you run around waving constantly. (not a good tactic in a DM)  All and all , the motions were fairly smooth and life-like, save for the problems mentioned above, the author did a nice job. * If you notice in the death animations Baron body either hovers above the ground, or lays in an unnatural position, you probably have an older copy of the model so update it with the tweaked version..

Score: Six 1/2 

The Skin(s)

This is the department that can make or break a model. Great models with bad skins lose quite a bit of quality aesthetically, as an average model can shine (no pun intended) with a sweet skin.  In Barons' case, the nice skinning job suits this model extremely well. Lets see the basics.. Altogether, 10 skins included with the zip (5 of them being CTF colors). At 256x256, the skins are Q2 Open-gl friendly with the wasted space at an acceptable 15%. All the skins were created by shines' "partner in crime", Chris "shatter" Holden, save for the Ashork skin done by the master himself OgrO-FiX (grokka orugha roo!) The CTF variants are, for the most part, color variants of the main Baron skin.  Detailing is really sweet due to effective shading, fine lining and dithering between colors. Some of the color choices did make a few skins appear, not quite "washed out" but somewhat light..  I did especially like the skull breastplate detailing on the Hk and Hkrain skins, and something many skin authors don't bother with, the tread or texture on the soles of the feet. The model was very well mapped, thus making easy skinning for would-be authors. There was only some slight stretching of the skin during animations but it is expected when animating and it occurs in Baron much less than the average model. Shatter has a really nice ability to skin and I know I may drop him a line when he is not busy, hehheh..
Score: Nine 

Death Match Screenshots

review by Hunter