Megatron
Rating: 2
baseq2/players/megatron
Intro
[ from readme text ] :
"The Original and Greatest leader of the Decepticons. Megatron was a transformer who turned into a handgun with silencer and scope. On his right forearm he had a fusion cannon. Present status: deceased"
That's plenty of info, most already know who this guy is. I'd just like to point out a slight correction, Megatron is not now or has he ever been actually deceased... in the toon timeline he was turned into Galvatron by the planet devourer Unicron (ooooh, run for your lives planetquake!) making him still alive, just in a new form, and in the Marvel comics timeline he was still kicking it, but in a deadlier tank mode courtesy of Cobra Commander and his group from the G.I. joe comics, again just a new body. If he at anytime had a brush with death after that, I can't seem to remember it, and I like to think I probably would. (Those of us old enough know these things :) This is coming from a guy who still has the original mini series on beta tapes from it's premier, heh heh.)
The Model
Whew, what to say, what to say. I started by tearing into this things legs. Hiding each face one at a time, then decided, "what's the point of checking further up?"
Looking past the fact that the majority of the polys in the legs are there TWICE! They're also two sided... as well as many hidden polys stuck here and there appearing as braces helping this thing keep it's shape. All I can really say and still remain respectful and polite is that this model is VERY poorly constructed and could have been done with half the polys without any visible loss.
Check out these figures.
[here we see the leg faces selected, then I push the Hide Selected button and Voila! we've got a model that's built inside and out with a few extra faces hanging around just for fun.]
[Now to the torso, I select the front faces on the chest, hit Hide Selected again, and I'll be GD... another chest?!?.]
Anyways, the weapon is of the invisible type, you know, the kind with the huge skin and enormous wastage.
I'll drop this section before I say something to demean myself.
Half a DeceptiStar...
Score: One
The Animations
Wow! Claymation at it's best!.. err, umm.. scratch that. Bad attempt at humor.
Well it was definitely done in 'Quake Model Editor' as the author states... oops another bad joke. Anyway, I at one time also used Phillip Martin's Q2 modeler to animate models. I used it on both Starscream and Grimlock and got fair results on both, but only because I spent a crapload of time on doing them frame by frame. I'm talking a couple weeks of animating, this author however, spent 10 hours on his. And it shows...
A word of advice to all modelers in training. Do what you have to do to get a hold of one of the premium animation packages. You'll get better results with one of those by only moving the model in three frames using key framing, than you would individually and painstakingly animating every frame one at a time in one of these freeware proggies. One star for the effort.
Score: Two
The Skin
The Skin: There's recently been a bit of a hoorah at the Discussion board about judgment of skins. Saying that we should judge by colors used and palette wastage and such. I do agree that you can NOT judge a skin by how many colors it uses, but come on, 17 UNIQUE COLORS?!?!
Well the parts of the skin that are laid out, are hardly shaded at all. I'm not too sure how well a good shade and light effects job would of even done this model with the poor mapping on it.
The Mapping: For those of you who are referred to as "the public", meaning that you really don't know a poly from a hamburger and don't care to, let me explain mapping to you a bit.
Imagine if you will, a box stuck to a wall, head level. from a 2d aspect all you are seeing is the front side of it. If you pulled out a can of spray paint and tried to "skin" the box, you'd only get the front side covered, sure some color would get around to the sides a bit but you'd have no control over it and it would look like utter crap.
Now if you took the box down, cut one corner lengthwise, then stuck it back on the wall laid out flat, you could cover every visible inch of the box's exterior.
So, what I'm trying to say is that the author didn't bother to cut the corner and lay his box out flat. The actual skin map of the sides of the body consists of one pixel in length. Meaning that no matter how good of a skin someone does for the model the sides will still be one solid color.
Add to that the enormous 67% wasted space and you've got yet another poor aspect of this here model.
Score: One
Sounds
Besides being badly recorded at various volume levels they suit the model quite well.
Score: Five
Visible Weapons Support
No
Pack Inclusion
Ummm, nope. Don't think so. The fact that it's 3 models in one, equaling an unnecessarily high poly count & the skin wastage keeps it out.
review by Rikki "Phukyumoto(CW)" Knight
author name DJ "Rattrap" Kehoe
tris.md2
Vertices 523
Mapping Vertices 1036
Polygons 1772
Skin size 256x256
Skin Wasted Space 67%
weapon.md2
Vertices 3
Mapping Vertices 3
Polygons 1
Skin size 320x200
Skin Wasted Space 99%
relevant links
International Transformers Tech Spec Archive
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