Frosty the Snowman
Rating: Six
baseq2/players/frosty
Intro
[ from readme text ] :
"...Huge bodies of snow rise from the ground poised and ready. Taking the form of harmless snowmen doing their battle dress of a Top hat and a rather ghastly scarf, they sit and wait - when we watch them they don't move. They just sit there, most of the time they're actually sleeping - it just sounds more dramatic having them quitely planning actack, rather than saying they're dreaming of stamping on robins and sparrows."
If you don't know what a snowman is, or even Frosty for that matter, then you've either lived a very sheltered life or were raised in a desert or tropical rain forest... probably both.
The Model
Well it's got a good construction for what it is. You get exactly what you expect. A rounded thing of snow. I would've personally chosen to cut a few polys on the spheres for the body, having them have 1 to 2 less segments would've kept them their round shape and given more poly's to do the hands a bit better. But on the other hand (get it heh heh) at a count of 112 polys used on both hands combined I'd say the existing polys just weren't used wisely. With that high of a hand count the mittens still appear very blocky.
Geez, how many times can I use the word "polys" in one paragraph :)
Anyways, it is what it is, a special holiday model made for a CTF mod that is now discontinued.
Score: Seven
The Animations
Nothing impressive here, but to the author's credit there's not too damn much you can do with two spheres, a top hat, and some mittens
Very basic animating going on, a few rotations and twists, with some nice facial movements here and there, a nice jump with just the right bounce to it, some hand gestures, and an ideal crouch where the model kind of melts into the ground. The jump and death animations are definately the high points of the model, giving much character to the round fellow. The rest is a bit dull and too simplistic in my opinion.
Score: Five
The Skin
The Skins: Simple skins for a simple model. On an artwork based judgement I'd give them a rather low score, but concept-wise they are perfect. The number of unique colors in the main Frosty skin is only 43, yet it works for the model very well. so thus far I'm about fifty fifty on the judgement of this section. Meaning 2.5 of 5
Now the skin size is another thing altogether. At 140x130, the skin size is not GL friendly at all and a bad choice of skin size for maximum pixelage altogether. There goes that half star.
The Mapping: Hmmm, not very good in this area. It appears that the skin verts were just taking from the front/back angles of the model and not scaled out/moved around for maximum skinnage at all.
Add in the 40% wasted space and you lose another half a star.., unfortunately leaving this area now at 1.5.
Score: Three
Sounds
The sounds are basically various gargling effects, but they are original and fit the model entirely, so that'll up the score.
Score: Seven
Visible Weapons Support
Yes, fully.
Pack Inclusion
The only things to keep it out are the skin wastage and size, and that's just not enough reason for me to shoot down a good effort.
review by Rikki "Phukyumoto(CW)" Knight
author name Citrus Frog
tris.md2
Vertices 363
Mapping Vertices 467
Polygons 644
Skin size 140x130
Skin Wasted Space 40%
weapon.md2
Vertices 42
Mapping Vertices 70
Polygons 72
Skin size 136x60
Skin Wasted Space 66%
relevant links
Phrozen CTF (discontinued)
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