Intro
Shrieking into battle with typical Macross presence is Queadluun-Rau, a highly efficient and effective suit of powered battle armor utilized by the elite female officers of the Zentraedi Air Combat forces. For the six of you out there who are not Macross/Robotech adherents, it should probably suffice to say that the wearer of the Queadluun-Rau armor really wants to shoot at you and has the ability to make you hurt a great deal more than you'd like.
Originality
The battle armor is a copy of an existing design which has been seen and used in role-playing games, animation, toys, adventure novels, lunchboxes, the Sistine Chapel (yes, even Michelangelo was into this stuff), etcetera. It's a neat design, but not one that hasn't been around the block a few hundred times already.
The Model
As usual, Dan has built a good model. Triangles are well-used and, though the upper arms could have been optimized somewhat without throwing off their shape ("somewhat" meaning only 2 faces each), the moderately high polygon count is justified. Most of all, and this is obviously of great importance when duplicating an existing design (while remaining within the bounds of good .MD2 practice, of course, which Queadluun-Rau does), the model is very true to the original subject material. Queadluun-Rau the Model doesn't diverge too much from Queadluun-Rau the Design. The antennae would have been a nice touch, though without an iota more optimization here or there she's skirting 800 faces now and it was probably a good idea to eliminate them from the .MD2. To sum up a rather short critique of a model's impressive construction that's thankfully difficult to pick apart: great model, no problems. The Animations
With this PPM, the author has graduated from Quake 2 Modeler (admittedly a very good program) to the more professional Lightwave (admittedly a much better program), and it shows. Gone is the annoyingly jittery animation that almost always results from vertex-by-vertex manipulation for motion. However, Queadluun-Rau's movement still leaves a little to be desired. Despite the skeletal deformation-granted ability to attain a much greater level of realism with a reasonable amount of toil, each Stand scene (the overwhelmingly arbitrary arm movement therein, specifically) has a very mechanical, marionette-like feel that brings strongly to mind those grinning automaton animals at Chuck-E-Cheeze's pizza parlor. This is supposed to be battle armor encasing a human whose limbs don't run pretentious movement cycles. It's sometimes difficult to make a Stand scene "interesting", simply because doing too much with the wrong areas of the body will attain exactly this sort of puppetlike effect once the scene starts looping and the movement becomes programmed; it's far better to remain subtle and allow a looping scene to appear natural on its own accord. Also, the Attack scene tends to be jerky beyond the natural effects of recoil and introduces some more arbitrariness that could have been eliminated for positive results. Finally, the last death scene wasn't terribly well thought-out in that she rolls off to the side before coming to her final resting place, exiting the bounding box and usually ending up inside a nearby wall. I'm not sure how that one was missed in testing ...
Beyond these problems, Queadluun-Rau's animation works well. The Run and Taunt scenes (the latter of which is very good indeed) really strike home the idea that the suit is being run by a woman. It's a testament to the author's expanding talent for animation when he can convey the idea that a traditionally male character type is actually female, even when the model itself offers no indication of gender either way (I didn't realize it was supposed to be female until I sarcastically told qME "Macross warriors are acting kind of feminine these days, eh?" and then shut up when I actually read the textfile and found out why I got that impression ...). Occasionally the movement seems to be lacking in impact and force, which is undoubtably due to a lack of experience in Lightwave animation on the author's part, but overall it's solid stuff and works in the game.
The skin mapping coordinates are set up properly, with no immediately discernible pixel stretching or blotching and only 30% wasted space. The five CTF, base, and movie skins included are a little grainy-looking but otherwise well-made and specially sized to accomodate 3D cards. Sounds N/A Visible Weapons Support Queadlunn-Rau's weapons are built into her arms and thus viewable weapons are neither supported nor appropriate. As the model was released prior to Quake II 3.15 and native VWeap support, the zipfile does include dummy weapons designed to avoid the infamous "diaper effect" on VWeap servers; now that the effect is no longer a problem on most servers (at the time of this writing, the only mod that seems to still have difficulty is Lithium), the various non-weapon.md2 weaponmodels need no longer be included. Pack Inclusion This PPM follows all the specified guidelines for inclusion, from skin size to wasted space to polygon count, and is otherwise appropriate for the pack simply because it's a good model very deserving of download and use.
review by Malekyth
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