Intro
Meet Senor Manuel Calavera, Aleksi Ikaheimo's first model...apparently built in QME and skinned with Paint Shop Pro.
He's a hero from the game called Grim Fandango.
Unfortunatly, I'm not familiar with this game...the title rings a bell though. And this guy looks famiar enough to me that I thik it's safe to say there's at least a vague resembelence.
You can check out Grim Fandango here:
That's about all there is to it. He's pretty interesting looking, very stylish in it's design.
The Model
No obvious errors with the mesh, did a good job of deleting hidden faces...like on the ends of the hands and both ends of the neck. If you're not gonna see them cause they're inside the mesh, get rid of em. Kudoos there. Couple of obvious places that should have been addressed. The edges forming the back of the knees needed to be divided to support bending at that joint. The from the outter ankle to the inner calf should have been turned so that it ran heel, outter calf...kind hard to explain that one, but I think you can find what I'm talking about. Would've helped the from work much better there. The hands are probably too complex, considering how small they are and how they're just little balled up fists anyway. Qute a few vertices that could have been welded around the neck too, shaved off a lot of unecessary geometry. I'm not terribly crazy about the way the neck joins the body, they just left a gaping hole there, and the neck doesn't even fit in it right. Would have been better to clost the hole up use the skin to suggest a hole instead. Joint at the elbow needs to be divided...much like the knee. In this case, there's too geometry on the front of the arm, but not enough on the back...could've mirrored them and been fine I think. The top of the head could've been simplified a bit by welding a couple of verts there...just not enough of a shape difference to warrent them being there. There is a really niced edge near the base of the head, that actually enhances the form of the model, forming a cheekbone...works well there. Overall a decent, if not simple model that's a fairly accurate representation of the character. It's pretty clean and works well, but nothing spectacular.
The weapon model was built by Neal Corbett (why does that name sound so familiar?) and a really fine example a low poly weapon.
Nice job Neal.
Slightly above average model here, works well for what it's portraying... only a few problems that needed to be addressed but weren't. The Animations
Won't dwell here too long, pretty average work. There's no attempt at conveying weight or mass, etc...no flow at all. But, they all read really well...the author could not do great animations, so he stuck with simple animations and they work. Some of them actually made me snicker a bit. They're kinda fun, in a silly, cute, simple way. I can't say they work for the character he's trying to portray, but there is a glimmer of character here. The stand is almost non-existant...he hardly moves at all, but somehow this works for this character. He comes of looking like some stiff in a suit. The run is really not very good, but it reads as a run...sort of. The attack is strange, he seems to recoil from the shot before he get's the gun up to fire. Pain1 is funny to me, he looks like a seal clapping. AR AR AR AR! *clap clap clap*. Pain2, pain3...yadda yadda, not much here. The jump is kinda neat, I really like the way he seems to hover for a second, he recovers nicely...there's a bit of follow through seen here. Works well. Flip, he raises is arms up...not sure exaclty what this is conveying...a shrug, surprise, don't shoot...not sure. This one's not quite as clear as the other sequences.
Salute, calmly stands there and spins his gun on the tip of his finger. Cute. The taunt is one of my favorites, lot of character in doing something like this...Stop or I'll kill myself again. I snickered when I saw this one. I know he's supposed to be waving in the wave animation, but it almost looks like he's fixing his hair...so this is really funny to me. Don't know what his feeat are doing here though, just wiggling for no purpose at all...that's not a good thing to do. Make your movement clear in it's purpose or it just distracts from other more important things going on. The Point is pretty self-explanatory...points with the gun. The crouch stand has a lot more action than the normal stand...he hunches over and looks around. The movement is stiff and mechanical here, but it works for this particular character. The crouch walk doesn't though...just not enough movement here to see anything...and of course his feet just slide back and forth. Same thing for the crouch attack, no recoil at all from the firing of his gun. Here's something fun to do with the crouch pain...load him up in skinview and turn the weapon off...then cycle through the crouch pain with some Elvis music playing...THE KING LIVES BABY! WELL...SORTA LIVES! Crouch death is weak, death1 is nice...love the end position here. Death2 has some really strange movement...just slightly different from death1. And death 3 finally takes advantage of the fact that his arms are built seperatly from the main body, and he falls apart at the seams. Intersting, not done real well, but interesting.
Also a problem with him floating a bit over the ground level...which isn't that noticeable. Unlike floating a bit under the ground level, which you could pick up from across the room.
Overall, very very simple animations that show some character in a lot of places...normally, this sort of movement would just be bad...but they really work here.
A solid average.
Here's where the model falls apart. At 320 x 200, the skin gets shrunken and skewed all ta hell in hardware mode. It's also mapped really badly, 65% wasted space, with the front and back of the body just plopped next to each other. Very very poor job of mapping layout. The skin itself is not very good either, it's dithered badly and for the most part week modeling. The suit is modeled a bit, there's some pretty decent folds around the knees. Very very subtle modeling on the head, which I almost didn't catch...mostly because it's so small and dithered so badly.
The weapon skin is actually worse. Same dimensions...95% wasted space. Shame, since it's such a simple model it really needed a good skin.
Really just not a very good job here. 1 star. Sounds
No sounds are packed with this model. Visible Weapons Support I think this model was done before view weapons were introduced to Quake2. So, no. Pack Inclusion The model meets the requirements for the pack, except in the skin department, where it falls miserably short, and he just doesn't fill the bounding box well enough...so I can't reccomend it for inclusion in the model packs. If you're a diehard fan of Grim Fandango, this might be worh a seperate download for you though.
review by
Wrath
|
|
